Christian Agrarians and the Crusade for Rural Community

The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

BAPTIZED WITH THE SOIL:

CHRISTIAN AGRARIANS AND THE CRUSADE FOR RURAL COMMUNITY,

1910-1970

A Dissertation in

History

Kevin M. Lowe

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December 2013

The dissertation of Kevin M. Lowe was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Philip Jenkins Emeritus Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities Dissertation Adviser Co-Chair of Committee

David G. Atwill Associate Professor of History and Asian Studies Graduate Program Director Co-Chair of Committee

Kathryn Merkel-Hess McDonald Assistant Professor of History and Asian Studies

Carolyn Sachs Professor of Rural Sociology Head of Women’s Studies Department

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. iii

Abstract

This dissertation is a history of the Christian commitment to rural America. Throughout the early and middle twentieth century, a broad Christian agrarian movement preached the importance of maintaining rural communities based on small-scale, family farm agriculture. This dissertation focuses on mainline Protestants, who were the most active and most visible of all Christian agrarians, although they have been the least studied. Christian agrarians argued that saving rural communities was critical for the nation’s future, because to live in the country, and especially to farm, was the most moral way to live. They believed that small rural communities were the best route to justice and opportunity for the nation as a whole. Protestant agrarians worked closely with the power of government, especially through state universities and cooperative extension, to train ministers and missionaries who could champion farming and rural life. Their belief that farming was an act of cooperation with God in creation led Christian agrarians to become leaders in the soil conservation movement, inspiring an environmentalist awareness and a language of stewardship decades before the environmental movement.

Table of Contents

List of Figures...... vi Acknowledgments...... vii Introduction - Consecrating the American Countryside ...... 1 What is Christian Agrarianism?...... 5 Farms, Cities, and the Struggle for American Identity...... 7 Possible Solutions to the Rural Crisis ...... 11 Agricultural Missions ...... 15 The Holy Earth...... 16 The Abundant Life ...... 18 Catholicism in the Countryside...... 20 Mainline Protestantism and the Nation’s Future...... 22 Historiography...... 28 Chapter Outline ...... 33 Chapter 1 - Working in God’s Country: The American Agricultural Missionary, 1910-1970...... 36 Rural Work in the Denominations...... 38 Interdenominational Cooperation...... 41 Training the Rural Pastor: Missionaries and Ministers in Town and Country ...... 47 Summer Schools for Rural Pastors...... 49 Cooperation Between Seminaries and State Universities...... 57 The Cornell University School for Missionaries ...... 61 Other Missionary Schools...... 69 Missionary Training in the Government...... 72 Rural Home Missions: The Methodist Church ...... 74 Rural Home Missions to African Americans...... 79 Conclusion ...... 83 Chapter 2 - Spiritual Efficiency: Rethinking the Rural Church Experience, 1925- 1970...... 84 Parish Consolidation and the Larger Parish...... 85 Larger Parishes in Practice...... 89 Other Strategies for Church Cooperation ...... 100 The Spirituality of the Rural Church...... 102 Rural Life Sunday ...... 104 The Ideas of Rural Life Sunday ...... 105 Worshipping on Rural Life Sunday...... 110 Rural Life Sunday and 4-H...... 113 Harvest Home Sunday...... 119 Conclusion ...... 123 v

Chapter 3 - Co-Workers in the Kingdom: The Lord’s Acre Movement, 1930-1970 ...... 125 Farming and the Depression ...... 126 The Lord’s Acre ...... 128 The Lord’s Acre Begins...... 130 James G.K. McClure and the Farmers Federation ...... 132 The Federation’s Religious Department...... 134 The Plan...... 137 The Lord’s Acre in Practice...... 139 Praise and Criticism for the Lord’s Acre...... 145 Promoting the Movement ...... 150 Growth and Inclusivity ...... 158 The Lord’s Acre Looks Abroad ...... 161 Spiritual Benefits of the Lord’s Acre ...... 163 Spiritual Benefits: Living Biblically ...... 164 Spiritual Benefits: Communal Participation...... 170 Spiritual Benefits: Christian Character...... 171 Spiritual Benefits: Partnerships with God ...... 176 Building the Kingdom ...... 179 Passing the Torch ...... 185 Conclusion ...... 187 Chapter 4 - The Gospel of the Soil: Soil Conservation, Stewardship, and Christian Environmentalism, 1930-1970...... 190 Christianity and Soil Conservation...... 194 Soil Conservation in the Federal Government...... 198 The Eleventh Commandment...... 201 Preaching Soil Conservation...... 203 The National Council of Churches and Agricultural Conservation ...... 215 The NCC and Stewardship...... 217 The State and the Spiritual Necessity of Soil Conservation ...... 223 Soil Stewardship Sunday ...... 228 The Ideas Behind Soil Stewardship Week...... 231 Publicizing Soil Stewardship ...... 234 Churches Respond to Soil Stewardship Week...... 237 Conclusion ...... 240 Conclusion - Who Needs Rural America?...... 242 Bibliography ...... 248

List of Figures

Figure 1: Church members at an unidentified church, holding samples of their Lord's Acre projects...... 143

Figure 2: James G.K. McClure, Jr.; Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace; Dumont Clarke; R. Douglas Stuart (chairman of the industrial advisory board of the National Recovery Administration), in Asheville, North Carolina, February 25, 1935...... 146

Figure 3: Lord's Acre Sunday at Sulphur Springs Baptist Church, Rutherford, North Carolina, November 16, 1952...... 167

Figure 4: Alice Petersen of Mills River, North Carolina, with her Lord's Acre ducks...172

vii

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due first of all to Philip Jenkins, who chaired this dissertation, for his unfailing support and mentorship through a sometimes grueling process. Many thanks to David Atwill, Kate Merkel-Hess, and Carolyn Sachs for offering their time and expertise by serving on the committee. I would also like to thank Jennifer Mittelstadt, under whose direction I undertook the initial work in 2007 that later bloomed (albeit in very different form) into this dissertation. Generous financial support for this dissertation came from the Penn State History Department, the Penn State Center for Global Studies, and Ted and Tracy McCloskey. The assistance of knowledgeable and unflappable archivists and librarians, at multiple locations, was indispensable. I would like to thank the following people: Eleanor Brown of Cornell University; Matthew Beland of the Drew University Archives; Chris Anderson of the Methodist Library at Drew University; Tracy Del Duca of the Ecumenical Library of the Interchurch Center; Karen Paar of Mars Hill College; Tanya Zanish-Belcher and Laura Sullivan of Iowa State University; Ann L. Moore of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Betty Bolden of Union Theological Seminary. I would like to thank as well all of the special collections staff of those institutions, along with the staff of the Presbyterian Historical Society, and the interlibrary loan department of Penn State University. Also indispensable was the love and support of close friends, particularly when things got rough. Thanks most especially to Ann Hubert, Dan Boucher, Kyle Macht, and Gretchen Macht. My community of musicians in central Pennsylvania is too numerous to name individually, but I thank them all for welcoming a rogue grad student into their midst. Many thanks to my family—particularly my parents, Jim and Carol Lowe, my brother Brian Lowe, and my grandparents Jack and Janet Lowe. They may not share my fascination with these topics, but they have been patient and unswerving supporters, and I could not have done this without them. Most importantly, I am eternally indebted to my wife Sarah. Her love is a great and wonderful grace.

Introduction Consecrating the American Countryside

The rural church is not a miniature or embryonic urban church. It is not an apprentice school for urban pastors, nor an asylum for broken-down ministers. Its primary function is to the community. - Arthur Carlos Van Saun, 19321

Rural America is suffering.2 Communities across the rural United States are daily losing jobs and opportunities. Though agriculture still dominates much of the rural countryside, farms employ only a tiny percentage of Americans. Meanwhile, the difficulty of sustaining rural non-farm businesses and industries means that many rural places continue to experience a “rural brain drain” by being unable to retain educated, entrepreneurial young people—destabilizing what might otherwise be healthy communities.3 Alan Guebert laments the rural Midwest as “a hundred empty Main Streets

1 Van Saun, “Replanning the Rural Church,” 103. 2 Throughout this dissertation I regularly use the words “America,” “American,” and “Americans” to refer to the United States. Although I acknowledge the political and intellectual deficiencies in applying this term to only this one nation, the degree to which the terms are entrenched in our language makes them difficult to avoid. 3 Wood, Survival of Rural America; Brown and Schafft, Rural People and Communities; Brown and Swanson, eds., Challenges for Rural America; Castle, ed., Changing American Countryside; Brad Plumer, “We’re Running Out of Farm Workers; Immigration Reform Won’t Help,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/01/29/the-u-s-is-running-out-of-farm- workers-immigration-reform-may-not-help/ (accessed February 6, 2013); Jennifer Sherman, Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Shirley Stewart Burns, Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal Surface Coal Mining on Southern West Virginia Communities (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2007). The phrase “rural brain drain” is taken from Patrick J. Carr and Maria Kefalas, Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What it Means For America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009). 2 for every busy one....Empty libraries, closed churches, full cemeteries.”4 John Ikerd goes so far as to call the contemporary depletion of the countryside “colonization”:

“Colonization today is being carried out by corporations instead of nations and the territories being colonized are rural areas instead of whole nations.”5

Many of these problems can be attributed in one way or another to a long history of industrialization in the countryside, a trend that stretches back to early in the twentieth century. Beginning soon after World War I, as Deborah Fitzgerald has argued, American agriculture started to become agribusiness, predicated upon an industrial ideal—an economy of scale and mechanization that has required fewer and fewer people to work the land. Since then, rural communities have become smaller and more dispersed. Rather than the web of small farms and villages it once had been, much of the American countryside (especially in the Midwest) has been transformed into endless fields of mechanically harvested crops, with hardly a person or town in sight.6

This dissertation explores the history of the opposition—those who believed that this industrial ideal was dangerous. It is a history of the belief that community is more important than the individual, that solidarity was more important than profit, and that one should put one’s neighbor (and the earth) before oneself. It is a history of people who championed agrarianism in the face of agribusiness. In other words, it is a history of an alternative idea of what the countryside was for.

4 Alan Guebert, “View from the Levee: No One’s Home,” The Daily Yonder, September 5, 2013, http://www.dailyyonder.com/view-levee-no-ones-home/2013/09/05/6751 (accessed September 12, 2013). 5 John Ikerd, “The Role of the Rural Church in Sustaining Rural Communities,” presentation at the 2007 International Rural Church Association Conference, Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, July 4, 2007, http://web.missouri.edu/~ikerdj/papers/Brandon%20--%20IRCA.htm (accessed September 10, 2013). 6 Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory. 3

It is also a history of American religion, because the loudest champions of agrarian community values were Christians. Beginning around the time of World War I,

American Christianity developed an influential agrarian voice. Critical of industrialization—though by no means opposed to the modern world—Christian agrarians staunchly defended family farms, small-scale agriculture, and rural communities that provided justice and opportunity for everyone. They stood by the idea of the rural community when many other social leaders were willing to sacrifice it to the twin goals of progress and modernization. Redoubling their efforts during the

Depression, and then maintaining them for decades to come, they promoted environmental conservation, teaching churchgoers about the importance of preserving the soil for future generations and developing a rural spirituality based on appreciation for the natural world. In other words, they argued that a healthy nation required healthy rural communities and healthy rural churches.

The legacy of Christian agrarianism still exists today. One can open almost any major Christian periodical today and find discussions about agriculture and rural life. The ability to sustain communities in the countryside seems increasingly relevant to American

Christians. Christians from across the spectrum have become loud and visible champions of sustainable agriculture, family farms, community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs, and organic food. Readers can easily find, for instance, critiques of corporate agricultural subsidies in the mainline Christian Century. Both evangelical and Catholic writers champion the virtues of organic gardening and the CSA model.7 Recognizing a

7 Amy Frykholm, “Down on the Farm: The Problem with Government Subsidies,” Christian Century, April 22, 2008, http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2008-04/down-farm (accessed February 6, 2013); Josh Bishop, “Digesting Grace: Why the Food We Eat Matters to God,” Christianity Today, August 15, 2012, http://www.christianitytoday.com/thisisourcity/7thcity/digesting-grace.html (accessed February 6, 2013); 4 rural deficiency within her own mainline tradition, Leslie Leyland Fields, writing in

Christianity Today, concludes that “as believers…we should be more thoughtful about food production and our treatment of God's creatures and his earth….As we do, we will discover another essential means of divining God's glory in our midst and living out our stewardship of God's earth, ourselves, and our neighbors.”8

As Fields suggests, an awareness of agricultural issues might increase awareness about rural communities as a whole. Accordingly, there is an ever-increasing number of mission groups and church institutes aimed at improving Christian life in the countryside, like Village Missions, the Whitworth Institute for Rural Ministry, and the Center for

Theology and the Land. Duke Divinity School operates a Thriving Rural Communities initiative to produce better ministry in North Carolina Methodist churches. For Catholics, there are organizations such as the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and the

Center for Earth Spirituality and Rural Ministry of School Sisters of Notre Dame.9

Programs such as these call attention to the ways in which the American countryside, and the people living there, have often been ignored or marginalized.

Although Christians of various denominations today support aspects of the agrarian vision, the long history of this movement has been lost, overlooked by scholars both of agriculture and American religion. Recent scholarship has begun to explore the

Kevin Ford, “Distributism and the Local Organic Food Movement,” Distributist Review, December 11, 2012, http://distributistreview.com/mag/2012/12/distributism-and-the-local-organic-food-movement/ (accessed February 6, 2013). 8 Leslie Leyland Fields, “A Feast Fit for the King,” Christianity Today, November 5, 2010, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/november/9.22.html (accessed August 19, 2013). 9 Village Missions, http://www.village-missions.org (accessed August 28, 2013); Whitworth Institute for Rural Ministry, http://www.whitworth.edu/FaithCenter/RuralMinistry/Index.htm (accessed August 28, 2013); Center for Theology and the Land, http://www.wartburgseminary.edu/template_Centers.asp?id=391 (accessed August 28, 2013); Duke Thriving Rural Communities, http://www.divinity.duke.edu/initiatives- centers/thriving-rural-communities (accessed September 10, 2013); National Catholic Rural Life Conference, http://www.ncrlc.com (accessed August 28, 2013); Center for Earth Spirituality and Rural Ministry of School Sisters of Notre Dame, http://www.ssnd.org/center-for-earth-spirituality (accessed August 28, 2013). 5

Catholic dimension of agrarianism, represented largely by the National Catholic Rural

Life Conference (NCRLC).10 This dissertation, however, explores a more active, more wide-reaching, and more influential wing of Christian agrarianism—mainline

Protestantism. Protestant and Catholic agrarianism largely operated in separate, though parallel, tracks. Although they shared many assumptions, mainline Protestant agrarians had wider publicity and enjoyed a closer relationship with the state than Catholics did.

That close relationship would prove critical for the spreading of agrarian ideas.

That relationship allowed Christian churches to have a strong influence on the national conversation about the future of the countryside. This dissertation shows how closely religion became entwined with the power of government, especially through state universities and cooperative extension. Although scholars have tended to portray the state and state universities as almost single-minded proponents of agribusiness, this dissertation demonstrates the degree to which state universities and extension services also supported the alternative agrarian vision at the same time. For much of the twentieth century, the circles of church and state in the United States easily overlapped, rather than obeying Jefferson’s ostensibly rigid “wall of separation.” Protestant agrarians took advantage of this blurry boundary to advance their goals.

What is Christian Agrarianism?

There have been many types of agrarianism in American society, ranging from a romantic idealization of country morality to a reactionary antiurbanism. Agrarians of all stripes, however, generally agreed that the family farm was the embodiment of the ideal

10 Bovée, The Church & the Land; Marlett, Saving the Heartland; Hamlin and McGreevy, “The Greening of America”; Allitt, “American Catholics and the Environment”; Woods, Cultivating Soil and Soul. 6 relationship between people and the earth. Agrarians praised the dedication that small- scale farming required—to the health of the land, to animals being raised, to the family that would grow up on the land and that would extend that dedication into future generations. Agrarianism meant a place-centered life.11

Christian agrarians agreed with these arguments, but their religious commitments made their version of agrarianism distinctive. Unlike secular agrarians, Christian agrarians naturally believed that churches could serve as focal points for rural communities. As one observer wrote, “The country town needs a social centre. The church need offer no apology for its ambition to take this place in the community….Ideally the one church should be the soil of the town and the centre of the social life.”12 Rebuilding rural communities would often mean re-engineering the role of the church itself, bringing a certain amount of modern efficiency to the experience of living in the country.

But at the same time, rebuilding rural communities also depended on changing how Americans saw themselves, and how they saw working in the countryside. Christian reformers constructed a vision of Christian life that was rooted in the productive and spiritual power of the soil. Christian agrarianism argued that the most important thing about working in agriculture and living in a rural area was that it put one as close as one could be to God and the process of creation. Christian agrarians called creation innately holy, and called upon farmers and all rural people to treat the earth with respect, care, and

11 On varieties of agrarianism, see Govan, “Agrarian and Agrarianism”; Danbom, “Romantic Agrarianism”; Allan Carlson, The New Agrarian Mind: The Movement Toward Decentralist Thought in Twentieth- Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000); Eric Freyfogle, ed., The New Agrarianism: Land, Culture, and the Community of Life (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2001); Major, Grounded Vision. 12 Anderson, The Country Town, 279-280. 7 even veneration. They opposed the destructive forces of industrialization and urbanization that had led to soil degradation and community instability. Calling agriculture a form of partnership with God, Christian agrarians turned it into a vocation, in order to convince people in rural communities that it was better to stay than to leave.

These were issues that mattered to all Americans, regardless of where they lived.

Agrarianism was not only about improving the lives of rural people. It was more importantly an attempt to prescribe national values, and national goals. What was the best way to live? What was the best way to work? Christian agrarians would add: How could people bring forth the Kingdom of God without living and working according to God’s plan?

Farms, Cities, and the Struggle for American Identity

The emergence of Christian agrarianism as an influential public voice coincided with dramatic changes in American agriculture and rural society. In what has been called the nation’s “second great transformation” (the first being the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century), American agriculture underwent an industrial revolution of its own at the opening of the twentieth century. Farm machinery like tractors became cheaper and more accessible. Companies began to produce more commodities aimed explicitly at farmers, trying to turn them into consumers like their urban counterparts. After World

War I, agriculture began to operate with an increasingly industrial mindset that encouraged farmers to expand, mechanize, and streamline, after the fashion of a factory.13

13 Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory. The phrase “second great transformation” is from Barron, Mixed Harvest; see also Danbom, The Resisted Revolution, 120-37. On tractors see Robert C. Williams, Fordson, Farmall, and Poppin’ Johnny: A History of the Farm Tractor and its Impact on America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 68, 90. 8

In financial terms, American agriculture prospered, adding nearly a million farms between 1900 and 1920. Much of the nation’s products were exported, producing income averaging about $15 billion dollars a year.14

The Depression that gripped the nation in the 1930s solidified the industrial transformation of American agriculture. Economic pressures forced many poorer farmers to sell their land, allowing other farmers to consolidate and increase the size of their farms. At the same time, the government emphasized the application of technology to the countryside. New Deal programs expanded electrification, enabling more farm families to purchase popular consumer technologies like washing machines and refrigerators. Rural roads were upgraded and paved to make way for the automobile. Changes like these brought legitimate relief to many rural people, especially farm women who generally welcomed the addition of labor-saving machinery to their homes and farms. Yet these changes also disrupted long-standing rural community networks, and threatened the survival of the traditional small family farm.15

In addition to social and economic changes, many rural places were experiencing substantial demographic shifts. In 1900, forty percent of the American people had lived on farms. Roughly another twenty percent lived in rural communities (population centers of fewer than 2,000 people). By 1920, that rural advantage had shifted. The 1920 census revealed that, for the first time, more than half of all Americans lived in urban places.

14 Gardner, American Agriculture, 50, 61, 129, 149. 15 Barron, Mixed Harvest; Jellison, Entitled to Power; Kline, Consumers in the Country; Neth, Preserving the Family Farm; Lisa Mae Robinson, “Safeguarded by Your Refrigerator: Mary Eagle Pennington’s Struggle with the National Association of Ice Industries,” in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, edited by Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), 253-270. Grey Osterud, “Farm Crisis and Rural Revitalization in South-Central New York during the Early Twentieth Century,” Agricultural History 84:2 (Spring 2010), 141-165, argues that automobiles and connections with cities actually helped rural community cohesion in her study area of the Nanticoke Valley, New York. 9

The rest continued to live in the countryside, both on farms and in rural villages, but the census data clearly indicated that the nation would become even more urban as time went on.16 Demographic changes often left the countryside both richer and poorer at the same time. Especially in the South, wealthy farmers found it increasingly easy to consolidate and industrialize, leaving small farmers (both black and white) at an increasing disadvantage, and driving a broad wedge between rural rich and poor.17

It was difficult for many Americans to digest these changes, because many people looked at the rural countryside as the nation’s moral rudder. Farming was not just a way to make a living; it was a way to make a moral life. Many Americans believed that moral influence to be necessary for the nation as a whole. “That the farm is the corner-stone of our national prosperity is a trite but true estimate,” wrote Mabel Carney of Illinois State

University in 1912. “Whatever affects the country is therefore of national concern, not only because of the material dependence of society upon farmers but because of the social, educational, and moral influence of so large a percentage of the general population.”18

Living on the land, this typical narrative went, offered fewer temptations than did cities. Living on the land was a family-centered life, a life rooted in dignified work and wholesome recreation, where children could grow up morally upright and close to God.

Children raised in such an environment, proponents argued, would go on to do great things. This was hardly a fringe belief. In 1929 the Institute of Public Affairs at the

16 Gardner, American Agriculture, 92. The proportion of rural people who live on farms declined to about 6% in 1990: John Fraser Hart, “‘Rural’ and ‘Farm’ No Longer Mean the Same,” in Castle, ed., Changing American Countryside, 64, 69. 17 Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost, 64-68; Charles S. Aiken, “The Rural South: A Historical View,” in Castle, Changing American Countryside, 322; Schultz, Rural Face of White Supremacy. 18 Carney, Country Life and the Country School, 3-4. 10

University of Virginia held a roundtable meeting to consider the future of the country church. At the meeting, Presbyterian leader Henry McLaughlin stated emphatically that

“the nation must be kept pure and virile in its ideals at the sources of its supply….The country communities are the springs, the seed plots and the nurseries of the nation’s life.”

McLaughlin noted that the nation’s most prominent business, political, and educational leaders had grown up in rural communities. “The national safety, therefore, will depend upon having a sufficient number of such communities from which the nation may draw its leadership.”19

This was in keeping with the general distaste for urban spaces common to the elites of the early twentieth century. Progressives and Social Gospel crusaders worked tirelessly among urban immigrant populations, trying to reform city life. Social Gospel theologians like Walter Rauschenbush argued that Christianity had a responsibility to uplift and improve communities in crisis.20 At the extreme, antimodernists blamed cities not only for physical ills but also for spiritual and social maladies, especially intemperance, rampant sexuality, and irreligion. Antimodernists at the turn of the century sought to revive aspects of medieval and premodern culture—especially craft guilds and artisan production—as antidotes to the dehumanizing effects of industrial America.21

19 Henry W. McLaughlin, “The Country Church and Public Affairs,” in McLaughlin, ed., The Country Church and Public Affairs, 28-29. 20 Rossinow, “Radicalization of the Social Gospel”; Carter, Decline and Revival; Phillips, Kingdom on Earth; Gorrell, Age of Social Responsibility; Bowman, “Sin, Spirituality, and Primitivism.” 21 Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 124-128, 142-149; Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms 1890-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 65, 184-193; Kathy Lee Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Lears, No Place of Grace; Edward S. Shapiro, “Decentralist Intellectuals and the New Deal,” Journal of American History 58:4 (Mar. 1972), 938-57. 11

But many who championed rural life as wholesome, moral, and necessary also recognized that all was not well in rural America. The demographic and social pressures facing the countryside were leading to instability. In 1907, for instance, Kenyon

Butterfield, president of Massachusetts Agricultural College (now UMass Amherst), acknowledged that rural communities suffered from isolation, a lack of organization, poor education, and (like cities) declining morality.22 These problems constituted a major challenge to society, but one that many people were eager to solve: “The whole nation is astir with it; its significance is commonly acknowledged; and remedies for its solution are proposed on every hand,” wrote Mabel Carney.23

Possible Solutions to the Rural Crisis

There were numerous possible solutions to the loss of American rural identity.

One response was to long for the past, and to revive traditional versions of individualist agrarianism. What Richard Hofstadter called the “agrarian myth”—Thomas Jefferson’s notion that the yeoman farmer was the true American, and the best protector of democracy—became extremely popular again in the 1920s and ’30s. A visible “back to the land” movement encouraged Americans to abandon industry and consumerism and revive the idealized Jeffersonian homesteading dream. Though many back-to-the-landers were interested primarily in promoting their own financial security within an increasingly volatile capitalist economy, their language often championed the freedom and self- sufficiency that were central to the old Jeffersonian dream.24 Homesteaders like Bolton

22 Butterfield, Chapters in Rural Progress, 11-41. 23 Carney, Country Life and the Country School, 1. 24 A. Whitney Griswold, Farming and Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 18-46; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1968), 23-36; Danbom, 12

Hall produced manuals describing how to live productively on just a few acres of land.

Helen and Scott Nearing moved to a remote corner of Vermont in 1930, built a home and a life by hand, and eventually described their experiences in the 1954 manifesto Living the Good Life. Marketing expert Ralph Borsodi moved to land outside of New York City, founded the School of Living, and published numerous writings criticizing industrialism, like the 1929 screed This Ugly Civilization.25 American fiction of the period also reflects this romanticism of the countryside, where novels and poems about homesteaders and small towns portray farming as “less an economic resource than a cultural heritage, vanishing into national mythology.”26 Though rural life had never been as simple or as ideal as its mythologizers held it to be, the belief in an easier past motivated many

Americans to try and avoid the future.

A second response was to simply apply the tools and resources of economic modernization to the countryside. The Progressive spirit of national uplift and scientific reform that dominated American urban politics at the turn of the century found a rural outlet in the form of the Country Life movement. This was a loose network of academics and social reformers (typical Progressives) who used social science to examine the problems endemic to rural communities. Country Life intellectuals typically advocated bringing the scientific “progress” of urban America to the countryside—improving

“Romantic Agrarianism.” Dona Brown, Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), argues that back-to-the-landers were not romantics but instead primarily interested in avoiding the market economy. 25 Bolton Hall, Three Acres and Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1922 [1907]); Scott and Helen Nearing, Living the Good Life (New York: Schocken, 1970 [1954]); Ralph Borsodi, This Ugly Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1929). See also David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Rebecca Kneale Gould, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Brown, Back to the Land. 26 Howarth, “Land and Word,” 24. 13 schools, churches, workplaces, and farms themselves to make them more efficient, streamlined, and modern.

The American anxiety over the countryside was so strong at the time that even

President Theodore Roosevelt was concerned. He created a Country Life Commission to draw upon the talents of Country Life intellectuals and formulate an official position on the state of the countryside. The movement’s 1909 report to the government offered a wide variety of proposals for modernizing rural life, including better roads, public health facilities, better postal delivery, and cooperative organizations for farmers.27 It lived on in the American Country Life Association (founded in 1919) and the smaller but very similar Association for the Advancement of Negro Country Life (founded in 1928)— along with smaller regional organizations inspired by the national groups. Both organizations especially advocated scientific farming, the wise use of technology, and cooperatives as solutions to the economic and social problems of the countryside.28

Christian agrarians found neither of these strategies entirely satisfying, and sought to steer a course down the middle. Although they championed small family farms, they were not simply nostalgic or reactionary, as if they were trying to recreate a lost past. The supposedly Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer did not appeal to Christian agrarians, because it was far too individualistic a vision. The Christian agrarian ideal saw the family as a community in microcosm, not a hierarchy oriented around a male head. Families needed to be in relationship to other families, in farm villages, rural towns, and especially in congregations. While this emphasis on the family certainly gendered the agrarian ideal,

27 Danbom, The Resisted Revolution; Bowers, The Country Life Movement; Scott J. Peters and Paul A. Morgan, “The Country Life Commission: Reconsidering a Milestone in American Agricultural History,” Agricultural History 78:3 (Summer, 2004), 289-316; Report of the Country Life Commission (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1909). 28 Schultz, “Benjamin Hubert,” 83-105; Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land, 215. 14 limiting the choices available to women especially, it was still more cooperative and relational than the Jeffersonian ideal. Christian agrarians were far more open to new ways of thought and new ways of working than “back to the landers” were.29

Although they accepted certain progressive styles of reform and uplift, Christian agrarians did not simply seek to mimic and transplant the urban experience in the countryside. Christian agrarians certainly opposed cities, but unlike plain nativists they did not hate the people living in them; instead, they argued that if city people could only be planted on the land, they could live a more virtuous and moral life. Ultimately,

Christian agrarians tried to fulfill what they saw as the inherent potential of rural life. In contrast to a stubborn antimodernism, they championed a blended, agrarian, rural modernity that embraced the old values of family, cooperation, and community, as well as some of the newer prospects of technology, higher education, and politics.30

Most importantly, however, they remained committed to a spiritual understanding of both the land itself and of a life spent working it. To agrarians, how people farmed reflected how they thought about God, their neighbors, and all of creation. The spiritual element was essential; as John Reisner, executive secretary of Agricultural Missions,

Inc., stated in 1937: “Is it not becoming more clear each day that our country life problems can never be solved on the basis of social, economic and political factors and that in some way, the religious and spiritual factors must be brought into the picture?”31

29 On the gendering of agrarianism, see Fink, Agrarian Women. 30 The term “rural modernity” is borrowed from Kathryn Merkel-Hess McDonald, “A New People: Rural Modernity in Republican China” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 2009). 31 John H. Reisner, letter to Christian Rural Fellowship members, Sep 7, 1937, box 7, folder 10, Cornell University Cooperative Extension records, #21-24-1975, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUA. 15

Agricultural Missions

Devotion to the agrarian gospel flowed out into a tireless desire to spread this spiritual understanding of land and community. This evangelistic impulse among agrarians developed into a clear understanding of themselves as missionaries for the cause. Over time, the idea of mission and missionaries became central to the agrarian project.

The agricultural missionary consciousness running throughout this dissertation is unusual for a number of reasons. First, whereas missionaries are commonly thought of only as international agents, agricultural missions actually originated within the borders of the United States. The first goal of agricultural missions was to reform and uplift the

United States. Even when agricultural missions became international after World War II, concern for international ministry was always combined with a primary focus on the domestic rural situation.32

Second, whereas missionaries are often popularly regarded as being exclusively concerned with winning converts and creating new churches, agricultural missions took a broader view. Traditional evangelism was not out of the question, but Christian agrarians were primarily concerned with improving Christianity (and thereby the nation) rather than spreading it. Because the term “missionary” means literally one who is sent forth, the desire to spread the Christian agrarian message makes it a missionary effort.

Agrarians saw an opportunity to uplift existing rural communities, and to convince all

Americans that rural life and rural community needed to be rethought.

32 This dissertation is not exactly a study of “home missions,” however. Home missions includes domestic missionary projects of all kinds, both rural and urban. Not all rural home missions projects have focused specifically on agriculture—many (like the Catholic Glenmary Home Missioners or the evangelical Rural Home Missionary Association) emphasize general evangelism and church planting in rural communities, or the development of rural industries, and I do not therefore consider them to be “agricultural missionaries.” 16

With such a missionary mindset, Christian agrarianism was often a top-down movement. Agrarians and reformers (including preachers) were often trying to promote ideas to the laity, rather than responding to ideas generated from below. But this does not mean that the laity were passive. Rather, when reformers’ ideas failed to resonate with the people in rural communities, they refused to implement them. And at the same time, individual communities shaped agrarian practices on their own terms, adjusting them to their own community needs.

The Holy Earth

There are a few additional philosophical threads and core tenets that run throughout the various proposals that American Protestant agrarians developed. One was the belief that the earth itself was holy. Even more than to recognized figures like John

Muir and the Transcendentalists, Protestant agrarians traced this idea primarily to the writings of an academic horticulturalist and agrarian named Liberty Hyde Bailey.33

Bailey, who became the dean of the New York State College of Agriculture at

Cornell University in 1904, believed that loving nature was fundamentally about loving agriculture. “Man is a land animal,” wrote Bailey, “and his connection with the earth, the soil, the plants, animals and atmosphere is intimate and fundamental. This earth- relationship is best expressed in agriculture,—not agriculture merely as a livelihood, but

33 On Bailey’s biography, see Philip Dorf, Liberty Hyde Bailey: An Informal Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956); A.D. Rodgers, Liberty Hyde Bailey: A Story of American Plant Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949); Zachary Michael Jack, “Introducing Sower and Seer, Liberty Hyde Bailey,” in Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 1-37. 17 as the expression of the essential relationship of man to his planet home.”34 This is an example of what two scholars have called Bailey’s “planetary agrarianism.”35

Bailey’s 1915 book The Holy Earth sets forth a “biocentric” vision of life on earth and humanity’s relationships with all of that life.36 According to Bailey, the earth was more than just worthy of respect—it was literally holy ground. It was holy “because man did not make it. We are here, part in the creation.” Since the earth itself was holy, everything on the earth was also holy. Plants and animals and all other living things,

Bailey wrote, “do not belong to man to do with them as he will. Dominion does not carry personal ownership.” The responsibility for properly overseeing a holy earth fell largely to farmers, in Bailey’s view, because the farmer’s “gain is also the gain of all the rest of us. . . .He is the agent or the representative of society to guard and to subdue the surface of the earth; and he is the agent of the divinity that made it.” Farming was not just labor, it was a divine sanction, a holy occupation—a vocation. In fact, Bailey claimed, “a man cannot be a good farmer unless he is a religious man.”37

Bailey’s ideas were so popular that Protestant agrarians in particular routinely cited them for decades to come. The Holy Earth was reprinted by the Christian Rural

Fellowship in 1943. The holiness of the earth, and the responsibility of farmers to cultivate that holiness, became key insights on which much of Protestant agrarianism was built.

34 Bailey, “What is Nature-Study?” Teacher’s Leaflets for Use in the Rural Schools 6 (Apr. 10, 1898), 95. 35 Morgan and Peters, “Planetary Agrarianism.” See also Armitage, Nature Study Movement, 173-74. 36 Morgan, “Liberty Hyde Bailey,” 131-39; Morgan and Peters, “Planetary Agrarianism.” 37 Bailey, Holy Earth, 14, 16, 32, 33. 18

The Abundant Life

Another core principle to which Protestant agrarians subscribed was that when farmers diligently cultivated the holy earth, everyone prospered. Agrarians viewed prosperity as both material and spiritual. Responsible farming would produce healthy and abundant crops, and economic success when those crops were sent to market. But living and working close to the land also meant a growth of spiritual abundance. Drawing on

Bailey, Protestant agrarians saw farmers as partners with God, enjoying close relationship with God’s creation. Engaging in such a holy pursuit created holiness not only for the farmers themselves but also for the communities around them—and, eventually, for all of society.

Protestant agrarians saw this as the heart of the Christian life. To live and work in accordance with God’s creation was to be in tune with John 10:10, in which Jesus described his own teleology: “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (KJV). Protestant agrarians seized on the idea of abundance. Agrarianism meant an “abundant life,” one that was rich in all the good things that God had created— not only plants and animals but also rewarding work, loving families, and worshipping communities that would give glory back to God. In 1939, Earl Frantz, a Brethren pastor from Grundy Center, Iowa, described the abundant life’s four main components: it meant

“good homes,” “financial security,” a “wholesome social life,” and “rich spiritual experience.” According to Frantz, this abundant life should be pursued, in a rural church especially, “in such a manner that future generations will not be handicapped through the 19 depletion of natural resources.”38 The New York State Rural Church Conference agreed when in 1944 it declared that “abundant rural living is based on Christian attitudes toward life, and a faith in God who is the source of all life and growth….The Christian church should concern itself with the whole life and well-being of the people.”39

“The abundant life” is a phrase that may be familiar in more recent American

Christian movements. Following World War II, Pentecostal leader Oral Roberts, for instance, published a magazine called Abundant Life that forwarded his charismatic theology of healing and salvation. Although Roberts believed in what he called “seed- faith”—being rewarded by God for having faith and for sharing what one had—he did not regard work as a central element of achieving prosperity.40 More recently, the idea of

God’s abundance has been taken to its logical extreme in what has come to be known as the “prosperity gospel.” Prosperity gospel advocates like T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, and

Joyce Meyer claim that God rewards faith with easy economic success, if believers simply ask earnestly enough.41

Protestant agrarians, however, seized upon the “abundant life” phrase years before movements like these, and gave it a different emphasis. In contrast to more recent manifestations, Protestant agrarians believed that the abundant life was the result not only of the proper faith but also of the proper practice—especially the practice of dignified, daily labor. Worship was certainly important, and reformers especially worked to

38 Earl M. Frantz, survey in Church of the Brethren Rural Pastors collection, box 1, Ralph Felton Papers, DUA. 39 Report of the Commissions Groups at the State Rural Church Conference, Lisle, New York, May 22-24, 1944, 7, Rural Institute folder, box 3, Hugh Anderson Moran papers, #39-2-972, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 40 David Edwin Harrell, Jr., Oral Roberts: An American Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 41 Kate Bowler, Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 20 encourage farmers to stay involved in churches, but agrarians saw farming itself as a religious vocation. Nor could farmers ever be necessarily assured of their success—crops still failed or drought might hit, regardless of how faithful the farmers were in their church attendance. Abundance, to agrarians, was a far subtler concept, measured in quality of life, not quantity of material goods.

Catholicism in the Countryside

Although this dissertation focuses on mainline Protestant agrarians, many

American Catholics also took a strong interest in the health and welfare of rural America.

However, Catholic agrarians did not cooperate as easily with Protestants as Protestants did with each other. American Catholic agrarianism largely operated on its own, through the efforts of the National Catholic Rural Life Conference (NCRLC). Established in

1923, the NCRLC grew rapidly in size and influence after 1930, attracting 18,000 people to its annual conventions by 1940.42

Catholic agrarianism drew on two major intellectual traditions not shared by

Protestants: the social thought of the papacy and the distributist economics of certain

English Catholics. The encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI formed the core of a body of social teaching that defended the rights of the modern industrial worker, and criticized both capitalist and socialist economics. Catholic social teaching affirmed the importance of just wages and worker’s rights, private property (especially land ownership), and the need for craft guilds, trade unions, and mutual benefit societies.43

42 Witte, Twenty-Five Years of Crusading, 89-124. 43 Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891), http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum- novarum_en.html (accessed January 13, 2013); Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931), 21

These papal teachings found broad acceptance in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, where they provided the inspiration for numerous episcopal teachings directed particularly at the American labor situation. The NCRLC read the papal arguments condemning industrial capitalism and supporting private land ownership as a promotion of agrarianism.44

Before the NCRLC, the major agrarian interpretation of the popes’ teachings was the work of English Catholic thinkers such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. In the

1920s they argued for a new economic arrangement called distributism, a “balanced and mixed economy of independent farmers and small industries owned and operated by those who toiled,” where land and wealth were not concentrated in a few powerful people but rather distributed justly among all the people. More than simple economics, it was a moral vision of a good society that hearkened back to the portrayal of the early Christian community in the Acts of the Apostles.45

Like other agrarians, however, the NCRLC concluded that the rural parish as the heart of a vibrant and diversified community dedicated to life on God’s earth, as the http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo- anno_en.html (accessed January 13, 2013); Roger Aubert, “The Great Themes of the Social Teachings of the Popes from Leo XIII to Paul VI,” in Roger Aubert, Catholic Social Teaching: An Historical Perspective, edited and translated by David A. Boileau (Marquette Studies in Theology 40; Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003), 205-339; O’Brien, American Catholics and Social Reform, 13-16; Charles E. Curran, Catholic Social Teaching, 1891-Present: A Historical, Theological, and Ethical Analysis (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002); Craig Prentiss, Debating God’s Economy: Social Justice in America on the Eve of Vatican II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). 44 The 1919 Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction, promulgated by John A. Ryan and the NCWC, used Rerum Novarum to criticize industrial monopolies and call for social welfare for returning World War veterans, while the 1936 pamphlet Organized Social Justice, signed by 131 Catholic social thinkers, used Quadragesimo Anno in order to praise the National Industrial Recovery Act and support the organization of labor unions. Raymond J. Miller, “The ‘Quadragesimo Anno’ and the Reconstruction of Agriculture,” Catholic Rural Life Objectives II (1936), 47-56; Aloisius J. Muench, “The Catholic Church and Rural Welfare,” Catholic Rural Life Objectives III (1937), 15-19; the popes are quoted very often in NCRLC, Manifesto on Rural Life (Milwaukee, Wis.: Bruce, 1939). See also Bovée, Church & the Land, 104; O’Brien, American Catholics and Social Reform, 41, 64. 45 Jay P. Corrin, Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 155. See also Marlett, Saving the Heartland, 29-30. 22 gentle stewards of God’s creation. Out in the field Catholic farmers might “see Him in a thousand manifestations about them and feel Him aiding them in their merely human efforts to nurture the growing plants of the fields.”46 By contrast, Catholic agrarians regarded industrial cities as revolting places filled with poverty and sin, in which the forces of capital oppressed workers and the din of consumer culture thoroughly drowned out God’s voice.47

The relationship between Catholic and Protestant agrarians was never particularly close, but neither was it particularly distant. Although they drew on different intellectual traditions, they agreed in broad strokes about the character of the ideal rural community.

They also shared a distinct anti-urbanism. Both Catholic and Protestant agrarians were uncomfortable with the immigrant culture of cities. Although the American Catholic church depended upon the immigrants who were arriving in great numbers to American cities in the early twentieth century, Catholic agrarians rejected the culture in which they were immersed when they arrived. Catholic agrarians, like Protestant agrarians, believed in rural life for its own sake, but they also believed it could be an antidote to the growth of the sinful city.48

Mainline Protestantism and the Nation’s Future

Although the Catholic agrarians figure occasionally in the story being told here, this dissertation is primarily a study of mainline Protestantism. Though in recent decades

46 National Catholic Rural Life Conference, Rural Life in a Peaceful World: A statement of principles and methods adopted at the Wartime Meeting of the Executive Committee and Advisory Board, January 12, 1944 (Des Moines: National Catholic Rural Life Conference, 1944), 3. 47 Luigi G. Ligutti, “Cities Kill,” Commonweal 32 (Aug. 2, 1940), 301. 48 O.E. Baker, “The Church and the Rural Youth,” Catholic Rural Life Objectives I (1935), 7-29; O.E. Baker, “Will More or Fewer People Live on the Land?” Catholic Rural Life Objectives II (1936), 57-71; Marlett, Saving the Heartland, 20-23. 23 it has not perhaps been particularly fashionable to study mainline Protestantism, it is nevertheless important. As Daniel Sack writes, “white mainline Protestantism needs to be studied as a particular religious tradition.” The key word here is particular. The narratives of American religious history, and of American Christianity in particular, have always privileged white Protestantism. Generations of mainline historians of American

Protestantism “assumed that their culturally dominant tradition was the universal tradition and that all other religious communities were, at best, variations on that main theme.”49

Other Christian traditions (let alone non-Christian religions) were seen as ancillary at best. More recently, historians of Christianity in America have emphasized that

Christianity has always been a complex, diverse, and conflicting set of traditions, and that non-Christian religions have long been vital players in the American marketplace of religion.50 Mainline Protestantism can therefore be studied as one aspect of this pluralistic history of American religions.

The term “mainline Protestantism” refers to the denominations to which the majority of Americans historically belonged. Seven basic denominations (formed and reformed through various mergers) housed the bulk of American Christians throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up until about the middle of the twentieth century. These were the Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists,

American Baptists, Evangelical Lutherans, and Disciples of Christ. Though these

(primarily white) denominations represented a wide spectrum of practices and ideas— from liturgical to evangelical in worship style, and from fundamentalist to modernist in theology and politics—together they dominated the public sphere of American

49 Sack, Whitebread Protestants, 2-3. 50 See for instance the essays in Brekus and Gilpin, eds., American Christianities. 24

Protestantism. In doing so, as Elesha Coffman has recently argued, they themselves created the idea of the “mainline,” effectively constructing an argument for why they should be seen as the most influential and American of Protestant denominations. For many years, including the period studied in this dissertation, the mainline exercised a striking influence in American government and social life.51

One of the most startling changes in American religious history of the last century is the degree to which these historically powerful denominations have lost their size and influence—at least from a numerical standpoint. For instance, in terms of position within the overall American religious landscape, the Presbyterian Church USA suffered a 49% loss in market share between 1940 and 1985, while the United Church of Christ lost 56% and the Disciples of Christ lost an astounding 70% of market share.52 Today, the seven so-called mainline denominations represent only about 18 percent of American

Christians.53 In response, Jason Lantzer has recently proposed a “new mainline,” in order to more accurately describe the majority of American Christians today. The new mainline would be comprised of Southern Baptists, Roman Catholics (with these two groups alone representing about one-third of the American population), Pentecostals, and nondenominational evangelicals of all kinds.54

51 Lantzer, Mainline Christianity; Coffman, Christian Century. Through mergers, these denominations often bear different names today. The Congregational Church is today known as the United Church of Christ; multiple Presbyterian bodies merged into today’s Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA); and the United Methodist Church was formed from a merger of multiple Methodist, Brethren, and Evangelical groups. Not all groups bearing the names of these denominations are typically included within the mainline: American Baptists are considered mainline, while Southern Baptists are not; PCUSA Presbyterians are considered mainline, while PCUS Presbyterians are not; ELCA Lutherans are considered mainline, while LCMS Lutherans are not. Nor are predominantly black denominations like the National Baptist Convention generally included within the mainline. 52 Finke and Stark, Churching of America, 248. 53 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey on Religious Affiliation, February 2008,” http://religions.pewforum.org/reports (accessed February 12, 2013). 54 Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, 121-137. Robert T. Handy, “The American Religious Depression, 1925- 1935,” Church History 29:1 (March 1960), 3-16, called the years following World War I a “religious 25

This drastic change in the demographics of American Protestantism is popularly referred to as “mainline decline.” It has been explained in many ways, including the inherent appeal of more demanding, conservative faiths; the inability of mainline denominations to evangelize as effectively as conservative denominations, or to pass on their faith to their children; the tendency of baby boomers to personalize and individuate their religious practices; and the accommodation of the old mainline denominations to secular values, sacrificing their distinctiveness.55 But as Coffman argues, to speak of decline is actually to “construct an idealized past in order to advance arguments about what ought to be rather than what was.”56 The real story of the trajectory of the traditional

Protestant mainline is far more interesting.

Sustained reflection on the role and place of the mainline denominations within

American culture and society should therefore focus not only on what has been lost but also on what has been retained. As David Hollinger argues, for instance, throughout the twentieth century, mainline denominations often took publicly unpopular or progressive stances on numerous social issues, especially with regard to peace, cooperation, and diversity. In many cases those stances have since become dominant in secular society, but their roots in mainline Protestantism are often unrecognized. Mainline denominations,

depression,” though now the phenomenon seems in large part to be one of shifting allegiances. Although mainline allegiance declined in rural places, the absolute number of both rural people and rural churches continued to grow. 55 Lantzer, Mainline Christianity, 2; Dean M. Kelley, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (New York: Harper, 1972); Roof and McKinney, American Mainline Religion; Roof, Spiritual Marketplace; Wuthnow, Restructuring of American Religion; Finke and Stark, Churching of America; Dean R. Hoge, Benton Johnson, and Donald A. Luidens, Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994). 56 Coffman, Christian Century, 8. 26 according to Hollinger, have been far more successful than simple membership numbers would suggest.57

The present work focuses on the traditional mainline denominations, but does not assume that those traditions were automatically either normative or dominant. Rather, many of the developments discussed in this dissertation were promoted because the mainline seemed to be losing its cultural dominance. At the same time, the groups discussed in this dissertation were engaged in the process of justifying their importance to the society as a whole—helping to portray themselves as deeply, and devoutly,

American. Many of them had a very real effect upon secular society. But even the battles that were lost still provide evidence of the way mainline churches attempted to entrench themselves into that society.58

The issue of accommodation to secular institutions is particularly relevant for this dissertation. The Protestant mainline and the institutions of secular government clearly have a longstanding relationship, whether oppositional or cooperative. Alison Collis

Greene has recently argued, for example, that during the Depression mainline

Protestantism ceded to government much of the control over social work and social action that the churches had previously held. Though religious charity did not disappear,

Greene acknowledges, churches “no longer controlled the debate,” and churches concentrated instead primarily on spiritual rather than material contributions.59 Others

57 Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire, 18-55. 58 Mainline Protestantism has been receiving considerably more scholarly attention in recent years, with major studies like Lantzer, Mainline Christianity; Gill, Embattled Ecumenism; Coffman, Christian Century; Mark Thomas Edwards, The Right of the Protestant Left: God’s Totalitarianism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Matthew S. Hedstrom, The Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Ruble, Gospel of Freedom and Power; Hollinger, After Cloven Tongues of Fire. 59 Greene, “‘No Depression in Heaven,’” 16. Although Greene makes a very good case about the Arkansas Delta, her study does not examine broader trends in Protestant social action that revolved around 27 have emphasized the persistence of strong interaction between churches and governments, particularly under the banner of “Christian realism.” This stance advocated active political engagement, and perhaps even militarism, to oppose the threats of fascism and communism.60

In fact, mainline denominations remained deeply involved with improving society long after the Depression. That work took on different forms than in previous years, but churches did not give up their responsibility for overseeing the well-being of both churchgoers and the broader society. At the same time, though, even when cooperating with secular organizations, mainline churches attempted to maintain their distinctiveness.

Contrary to popular belief, this dissertation suggests that mainline Christians often refused to downplay their Christianity and their theological reasons for getting involved in rural life—in fact, their religious motivations for promoting agriculture often bled over into ostensibly secular organizations. They embraced both science and government, looking for ways to create partnerships that would promote their ideas as widely as possible. They saw no inherent conflict between secular society and Christianity.

Agrarians wanted to reform and build upon society, not stand outside it. To justify the importance of agriculture to the Christian mission, for example, Presbyterian leader

Warren Wilson looked back to biblical tradition: “The Hebrews were made a holy nation in part by the agricultural teaching of Deuteronomy.” But Wilson embraced the developments that secular society had made, even while he brought them into a religious orbit. “Scientific agriculture,” he continued, “is a modern commentary on

agrarianism. Greene is explicitly focused upon charitable social action. See Hollinger’s argument in After Cloven Tongues of Fire for contrast. 60 McCarraher, Christian Critics, 89-119. 28

Deuteronomy.”61 Protestant agrarians saw themselves as but one link in a long chain of religious and scientific tradition. If observers at times failed to see a difference between mainline denominations and secular organizations, it was because the secular world had incorporated religious qualities, not the other way around.

American Protestants did not turn their back on rural America; they fought desperately to save the rural communities and rural churches they believed represented the nation’s core. Agrarian ideas animated their vision of the future. Although the future did not turn out exactly as they planned, their ideas and actions proved far more influential than historians have realized.

Historiography

This dissertation contributes to gaps in numerous historiographical trends. Its primary contribution is to the field of American religious history—a field that has generally undervalued the role of rural religion in the twentieth century. Most surveys of twentieth-century American religion ignore rural life entirely, in favor of urban and suburban phenomena. Although recent work has begun to illuminate the roles religion played in both structuring rural communities and galvanizing social protest, rural life is still typically seen as the precursor to more “modern” forms of social and religious life, rather than a continuing and vibrant mode of existence in its own right.62

61 Wilson, Church at the Center, 30. 62 Single-volume surveys like Sydney Ahlstrom’s Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972) and Edwin V. Gaustad’s Religious History of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1990) make almost no mention of rural religion after World War I. Martin Marty’s 3-volume Modern American Religion presents rural religion only through the lens of fundamentalism. Methodological collections, such as New Directions in American Religious History, edited by Harry S. Stout and D.G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Retelling U.S. Religious History, edited by Thomas A. Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Recent Themes in American Religious History: Historians in Conversation, edited by Randall J. Stephens (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 29

Other scholars are more overtly antagonistic. Although they only analyze one small part of the Christian agrarian project, Roger Finke and Rodney Starke claim the whole movement was misguided. They argue that there was not in fact any problem with church membership in rural places. Rather, it was simply a change in denominational demographics. Christianity as a whole was growing, and the conservative and evangelical groups were growing the most.63 To claim that this change was not a crisis is, on the one hand, to ignore perspective—that is, to overlook how mainline Protestants felt about those evangelical groups. The rapid growth of new evangelical (and especially

Pentecostal) sects was met with distaste, if not outright horror, by many mainline

Protestants. The particular strength of evangelicalism in rural places meant that mainline churches that wished to remain strong had a serious challenge before them.64

But on the other hand, while mainline Protestants may not have had much sympathy for the growing emotionalist sects, many had no particular interest in opposing them outright either. Rather, the challenges with which mainline rural Protestants were most concerned had less to do with the growing presence of religious competition than with the broader social and economic trends facing the rural United States in the early twentieth century.

For their part, rural historians have traditionally paid little attention to religion.

The few synthetic works of rural history that exist typically treat religion only as a demographic characteristic of white settlement and migration prior to the twentieth

2009), contain no essays specifically on rural religion. Richard P. Swierenga is one of the few to have publicly lamented the dearth of attention to rural religion, yet few have taken up the call since then: Swierenga, “The Little White Church.” Newer and more promising work includes Joe Creech, Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Richard J. Callahan, Jr., Work and Faith in the Kentucky Coal Fields: Rooted in Dust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Roll, Spirit of Rebellion; Gellman and Roll, Gospel of the Working Class. 63 Finke and Stark, Churching of America, 207. 64 Brunner, Church Life in the Rural South, 45. 30 century. Nor do studies of agrarianism as an intellectual movement devote much attention to the close connections between agrarian and religious ideas.65 In 1983, Jacob Dorn issued a call for more research on the interwar Protestant rural movement; as hardly anyone has taken up that challenge in earnest since, this dissertation is a starting contribution toward that goal.66

In addition to bridging this gap between fields, this dissertation also contributes a new understanding of the Christian agrarian movement as an ecumenical phenomenon that existed over a long period of time. Some individual studies, most some decades old, have analyzed parts of the Protestant rural church movement, but focus either primarily on academic reformers (instead of church members themselves) or on individual denominations (giving the impression that rural church work was atomized rather than cooperative). In addition, existing studies focus primarily on the pre-World War I period and argue that interest in rural reform had expired by the early 1920s.67 This dissertation employs a much wider scope. Church interest in rural life actually took off most dramatically during the 1930s and continued past World War II, into the 1960s and

1970s. In addition, agricultural missions were often emphatically ecumenical, aiming not only at improving society together but at developing the global reign of Christianity.

65 Danbom, Born in the Country; Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost, which only devotes brief attention to southern Baptists; Shover, First Majority-Last Minority; Montmarquet, Idea of Agrarianism; Major, Grounded Vision, which broadens agrarianism and applies it to a host of other intellectual and cultural movements but has nothing to say about religion. 66 Dorn, “The Rural Ideal and Agrarian Realities.” 67 Swanson, “The ‘Country Life Movement’”; Madison, “Reformers and the Rural Church”; Beltman, “Rural Church Reform in Wisconsin.” Madison in particular dismisses religious activity as “largely symbolic” (and therefore in his view ineffectual), without attempting to analyze or understand the complexity of religious activity (662). On individual denominations see Gall, “Presbyterians, Warren Wilson, and the Country Life Movement”; Gall, “The Country Life Movement,” both of which deal only with Presbyterians; Stone, “Rescue the Perishing,” which treats only Southern Baptists; Brown, Davidson, and Brown, Vision Fulfilling, and Butt, Preach There Also, which deal with Episcopalians. 31

Reforming society and building the Kingdom of God generally meant trusting and working alongside other denominations.

These goals mean that many of the Protestant agrarians described in this dissertation fall broadly within the Progressive social gospel tradition. This dissertation supports recent work demonstrating that the social gospel had an important rural dimension. Missionary projects throughout the nation especially reflected a concern with bettering society, even in the supposedly anti-progressive South. Yet historians of the social gospel have largely ignored the ways in which Protestants explicitly worked with agriculture and rural churches themselves, as opposed to institutions like rural schools and hospitals. The ideas of Christian agrarians also echoed the theological grounding of the social gospel, although they generally pressed even further. Agrarians, like most social gospellers, thought that the forces of secular society could indeed help inaugurate the Kingdom of God. Still, they preferred reform to be definitely Christian in nature.

Their first priority was to harness the Christian capacity for labor and right action. Only after Christians themselves stepped forward could they align themselves with the secular world.68

This dissertation’s second major contribution is to the literature on American environmental history. Environmental history has had surprisingly little to say on the subject of agriculture. Environmental historians once generally blamed farmers for environmental ills, assumed farmers had no reason to engage with conservation efforts, or ignored the environmental aspects of agriculture altogether. Recent work, however, has

68 On missionary projects and Southern progressivism see for instance McDowell, Social Gospel in the South; Harper, Quality of Mercy; Link, Paradox of Southern Progressivism; Hoffschwelle, Rebuilding the Rural Southern Community; Reid, Reaping a Greater Harvest. One exception to the general scholarly slight of rural religious missionary projects is the community at Koinonia Farm; see K’Meyer, Interracialism and Christian Community; Coble, “‘A Demonstration Plot.’” 32 begun to show that farmers have had complex relationships with their land, and have contributed to conservation and environmentalism.69 Similarly, environmental history has traditionally had little to say about the role of religion in the construction of ideas about the environment. Recent monographs that attempt to theorize the connection between religion and environmentalism suffer from either too narrow or arbitrary a range of sources, or else too brief a historical timeline. American Christian concern for the environment is generally regarded as a post-1960s phenomenon, or as an exclusively

Protestant domain (or both). Yet Catholics had strong environmental ideas as well, and as this dissertation shows, the contemporary creation care movement has deeper roots than the 1960s.70

This dissertation broadens this literature by examining an unrecognized source of environmental awareness: Protestant agrarianism. Protestant agrarians encouraged farmers to see themselves as stewards of the earth, decades before the 1960s counterculture adopted the idea of stewardship. Protestant agrarians and agricultural missionaries worked to instill an environmental ethic in their subjects that was based not

69 On the field as a whole, see Mart A. Stewart, “If John Muir Had Been an Agrarian: American Environmental History West and South,” Environment and History 11 (2005): 139-62. Worster, Dust Bowl, blames farm capitalism for the Dust Bowl, while Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapter 9, portrays farmers as essentially conservative and almost necessarily antienvironmental because of their position as producers. On agricultural conservation see Richard Judd, Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002); Beeman and Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land; Madison, “Green Fields.” 70 The main works on this theme are Fowler, Greening of Protestant Thought; Thomas R. Dunlap, Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature; Stoll, “Quest for Green Religion”; Nash, Rights of Nature, 87-123; Moody, “Caring for Creation”; but they all suffer from the problems described. Schmidt, “From Arbor Day to the Environmental Sabbath,” is a helpful discussion of nature and Protestant piety, though Schmidt does not develop this theme in his longer works. On Catholic environmentalism see Hamlin and McGreevy, “The Greening of America”; Allitt, “American Catholics and the Environment.” 33 on evocative wilderness landscapes but on the settled working landscape of American agriculture.

Chapter Outline

The four chapters of this dissertation are primarily thematic in nature, but they follow a general chronology of the development of American agriculture. This dissertation is also primarily focused on the ideas and ideologies of the movement’s leadership, rather than on the social history of the laity. Despite this largely top-down perspective, however, it includes attention to the reception of these ideas, as well as interaction between the reformers and the laity, wherever possible.

The first chapter begins at about the time of World War I, when when American agriculture as a whole was beginning to solidify its industrial ideology. In reaction to this orientation, mainline Protestant agrarians began to develop their missionary awareness.

Agrarians argued against the predominant industrializing trends, and their ideas gave rise to a variety of ecumenical structures intended to address the rural problem. Mainline

Protestants studied rural churches and devised strategies for saving them. Most significantly, churches looked to secular institutions like universities for assistance with training the next generation of pastors and missionaries destined for jobs in rural areas.

Together, the sacred and secular institutions provided the template for a new type of missionary—the agricultural missionary.

The second chapter runs chronologically parallel to the first. It focuses more directly on the effects that these ecumenical institutions had on communities themselves.

Drawing on a Progressive legacy, rural church reformers promoted new strategies for 34 organizing and running churches, methods that sometimes conflicted with what individual churchgoers desired. At the same time, denominations and ecumenical organizations promoted new types of rural spirituality, in hopes of cementing devotion to the countryside. Festivals like Rural Life Sunday and Harvest Home Sunday became popular observances, though they remained controversial.

The Great Depression increased general interest in the agrarian project. Although industrialization and farm consolidation continued in earnest throughout the Depression, the failure of the nation’s financial stability led many people to look elsewhere. Agrarians encouraged Americans to look into their own communities for support. The third chapter examines a grass-roots rural uplift strategy that ballooned in popularity across the United

States beginning in 1930. The Lord’s Acre movement grew from North Carolina roots into a national and even international social movement, one that saw laypeople taking responsibility for saving and sustaining their own churches—and through them, again, their communities. While it focused on encouraging financial support within small churches, the Lord’s Acre movement ultimately saw its job as producing nothing less than the Kingdom of God in the countryside. It allowed individual church members to develop their own missionary sense of agrarianism.

The fourth chapter examines in more detail the ethical and spiritual underpinnings of Protestant agrarianism. Again in reaction to the challenges of the Depression,

Protestant agrarians began to articulate much more clearly than before a strong conservationist ethic devoted to saving agricultural land from degradation. Relying on a sense of the holiness of the earth, Protestant agrarians devoted themselves to promoting soil conservation, again through a variety of denominational and interdenominational 35 channels. In partnership with numerous government agencies, Protestant agrarians helped inculcate a conservationist ethic among American farmers, which helped pave the way for a deeper engagement with environmentalism after 1970. Although financial stability eventually returned to the nation after World War II, the agrarian project had gained a solid footing during the Depression, which allowed it to remain visible and influential for decades to come.

In 1990, Wendell Berry, himself a Christian agrarian, criticized Protestant denominations for shortchanging rural areas by treating them as “training fields,” quickly moving talented ministers to supposedly better congregations in urban places.71 He lamented the lack of concern for rural communities and rural people among the churches he knew best. This dissertation does not deny Berry’s complaints, but it does show that

Protestant churches tried to cope with a rapidly changing rural America. For much of the twentieth century, mainline Protestants were more concerned than anyone else with rural communities. They fervently believed that a revitalized rural America would be the salvation of the country as a whole.

71 Wendell Berry, “God and Country,” in What are People For? (New York: North Point Press, 1990), 97. 36

Chapter 1

Working in God’s Country: The American Agricultural Missionary, 1910-1970

Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it: thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is full of water: thou preparest them corn, when thou hast so provided for it. Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly: thou settlest the furrows thereof: thou makest it soft with showers: thou blessest the springing thereof. - Psalm 65:9-10 (KJV)

This chapter describes how American Protestantism developed an agricultural missionary consciousness. The Christian agrarian movement focused initially on revitalizing rural churches themselves, seeing them as focal points for rural communities.

In order to uplift rural churches, agrarians first had to convince people of the necessity of reform. In doing so, agrarians developed their own sense of the importance of the agrarian project, and learned the best strategies for carrying it out.

Rural reform began by simply applying fairly simple solutions to rural problems—generally forcing churches to close or consolidate. After a chilly reception, however, reformers changed their tactics to focus on changing religious workers themselves. By partnering with secular institutions like colleges and universities, churches envisioned producing a well-educated pastorate that was devoted to the rural cause. Churches then began training domestic missionaries for specifically rural roles, placing individuals in troubled rural areas to try to improve the lives of rural churchgoers. 37

These agricultural missionaries often acted in traditional evangelistic roles, but they also served to promote agrarian values. Sometimes they engaged directly with the practice of agriculture in the places where they served.1

The rural church movement first emerged at a time of deep uncertainty about the health of the rural United States. The anxiety over the health of the countryside led mainline Protestants to work together to strengthen their presence in the countryside. To convince people of their values and to promote their ideal vision of land and labor,

Protestant agrarians typically worked across denominational lines in ecumenical organizations. The movement also emerged at a time when agriculture was beginning to be professionalized and industrialized. The land-grant universities had a major role in these changes, promoting a scientific approach to agriculture that harmonized easily with the introduction of new technologies and new farming methods.2 Land-grant universities, however, also supported the Christian agrarian mission—a philosophy that ran in opposition to the dominant industrial approach.

Although the concept of the agricultural missionary was developed over a number of decades, Protestants began working together to address rural issues in the 1900s. They then continued experimenting with strategies and organizations for decades. This chapter, therefore, describes events taking place over a significant period of time, from the earliest attempts to missionary projects in the 1940s, 1950, and 1960s. Together, sacred and

1 Historians of missions have given inadequate attention to agricultural missions. Recent surveys like Robert, Christian Mission, make no mention of the movement. What studies exist do not put the agricultural mission effort into a sufficiently broad context. See for example Hess, “American Agricultural Missionaries”; Stross, Stubborn Earth, 92-115; Leedy, “The World the Students Made”; Leedy, “History with a Mission.” Yet agricultural missionaries formed a major contingent of the overall missionary project in the twentieth century. 2 Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory. 38 secular organizations promoted the Protestant agrarian view of the ideal community, and created the idea of the agricultural missionary.

Rural Work in the Denominations

Although the primary energy behind the rural church movement was ecumenical, there were important predecessors within individual Protestant denominations.

Presbyterians were the first denomination to recognize formally the importance of specifically targeting rural areas. The Presbyterian Church USA, a primarily northern denomination, had grown substantially at the end of the nineteenth century. Much of that growth was in rural areas. In 1908, the denomination appointed Warren Wilson to its

Board of Missions to oversee new rural programs—which two years later were formalized into a Department of Church and Country Life. Wilson held a divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary and a doctorate in sociology from Columbia

University, and was serving as pastor to a Brooklyn congregation. He seemed to have endless energy for rural work, and at least one of his successors considered him a prophet.3

Immediately upon being hired by the Board of Missions, Wilson began to travel the country holding conferences and institutes with local laypeople. “The purpose of the institute was to get the people together and to start their thinking on a vital community program based upon community needs rather than creeds.”4 The Board of Missions

3 Randolph, Golden Harvest, 28-33. 4 Randolph, Golden Harvest, 34. 39 institutes sometimes inspired local organizations, both inside and outside the church, to hold their own gatherings.5

Country Protestant churches did have a lot of needs at the beginning of the century. As the Department began to take statistical surveys of the rural church situation, it found that thousands of churches had recently been abandoned for lack of participation, and that many more churches were declining rapidly. Especially in the Midwest, rural churches were small, understaffed, and largely inactive, due to a lack of attention from the denominational leadership. Many rural places had too many churches for their shrinking populations, and therefore could hardly raise enough money to sustain anything like a vital ministry.6

This did not necessarily mean that people wanted their churches to be changed.

When Wilson and the Presbyterians organized a “demonstration parish” in the Salt River

Presbytery of central Missouri in 1911, locals regarded the denomination’s work with contempt. The Department of Church and Country Life paid for new, energetic ministers to live within the parish, closed six churches that were particularly small and struggling, and advised joining forces both with southern Presbyterians and with local Methodists,

Baptists, and Disciples. None of these actions was met with approval, largely because, according to Jeffrey Gall, “country life leaders never actually considered what the farmers wanted from their small churches; they instead patronizingly made plans for the revitalization of such churches to be handed down from above.”7 Progressive reform that did not emerge organically from the needs of local people was likely to fail.

5 Gall, “The Country Life Movement,” 169. 6 Gall, “Presbyterians, Warren Wilson, and the Country Life Movement,” 218-19; Beltman, “Rural Church Reform.” 7 Gall, “The Country Life Movement,” 202. 40

Other denominations eventually began to take up the Presbyterians’ mantle. The

Methodist Episcopal Church opened its own rural department in 1916, though it was not nearly as active as the Presbyterians, and the Methodist Church was less open to cooperation than the Presbyterians were.8 In New England, the Congregational Church organized a New England Rural Life Discussional, held in Concord, New Hampshire, in

October 1922. The group of ministers and church leaders agreed that building up rural churches in their region was critical not only to the health of their own denomination but to Christianity as a whole; their stated goal was “to develop and organize the lay forces of our rural communities so that all our available spiritual resources may be directed to realizing the new earth in which righteousness is to dwell.”9

Although not a part of the mainline Protestant structure, the Southern Baptist

Convention, an overwhelmingly rural denomination, became interested in rural reform as well. Despite the denomination’s decentralized structure, its leadership advocated for many social gospel reforms, with a special interest in educational improvements.

Prominent Baptists also lamented the fact that many rural Southern Baptist churches did not have resident pastors or even regular preaching; many churches were only visited by preachers once a month. In the 1910s and 1920s, Southern Baptists began carrying out surveys and campaigns to enlist local churches in better stewardship. They focused especially on creating mission schools in the Appalachians.10 As for Roman Catholics, when the National Catholic Rural Life Conference was formed in 1923, it was already considerably outpaced by developments within the Protestant denominations.

8 Madison, “Reformers and the Rural Church,” 653. 9 “Report of the New England Rural Life Discussional, Concord, New Hampshire, October 10-12, 1922.” Kenyon L. Butterfield papers, 1889-1945, Box 23 folder 10, UMA. 10 Stone, “Rescue the Perishing.” 41

Interdenominational Cooperation

The primary energy behind the development of Protestant agrarianism, however, was ecumenical in spirit. The ecumenical rural movement took shape primarily in the wake of World War I, and rather than expiring in the Depression, the rural movement actually began to flower, producing long-lasting institutions like the Home Missions

Council, whose work was continued in decades to come by the National Council of

Churches. The pressures of the Depression solidified the need for a strong agrarian movement within American Christianity, a movement that sought to teach the rest of the country the importance of place, agriculture, and the Gospel.

One of the most prominent early ecumenical organizations was the Home

Missions Council (HMC). It had been founded in the spring of 1908, just nine months before the formal creation of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC). It quickly gained the support of both the major mainline and evangelical denominations and church bodies, with the notable exception of the Southern Baptist Convention. With the clear intention of winning all of the United States to Christ—building the Kingdom of God—the HMC found a natural ally in the FCC.11

Following typical Progressive practice, the HMC engaged in statistical surveys of the religious demographics of the country. It found that “not competition but neglect was the main problem” facing much of the nation.12 It was not that there were too many rival denominations but instead that there was not enough emphasis on building up churches, especially in the predominantly rural parts of the country.

11 Handy, We Witness Together, 24. 12 Handy, We Witness Together, 45. 42

The Home Missions Council maintained an emphasis on rural and agricultural issues for decades. In doing so, its members and partners consistently articulated a holistic agrarian view of the church and its relationship to rural society. During the depths of the Depression, at a 1936 HMC conference on “The Church and the Agricultural

Situation,” Charles Edwin Friley, president of Iowa State, acknowledged his belief that the country had “fallen into the vain illusion that our social, economic, and spiritual ills can be cured by a legislative enactment. This cannot be done. It is only as the nation cleanses its heart and seeks for a right spirit that we shall find the solution to the problems that lie before us.” That spirit, in his view, could be promoted by the nation’s rural churches, which “furnish a spiritual dynamic for right living,” “provide a comforting and steadying faith,” and “promote appreciation of beauty,” among other values.13 Mark Dawber argued that “economics is not primarily a material interest; it is primarily a spiritual interest. It is not based primarily on commodity and exchange values. The main considerations are in the realm of attitudes and relationships.” The church, with its social responsibilities, could promote cooperative working relationships among people. To Dawber, this was the central message of Christianity itself: “The Cross is the symbol of sacrificial service without which there can be no social solidarity.”14

At another conference the same year, Dawber noted that “there is an important connection between a profitable agriculture and a strong, vital country church.” The rural church needed not only to articulate new values but also to make them real. That process would begin—drawing again on Bailey—with a “deep appreciation of the soil as a basic value in the life of country people. The soil, the home, the family….but under all is the

13 Home Missions Council, The Church and the Agricultural Situation, 7-10. 14 Home Missions Council, The Church and the Agricultural Situation, 32, 34. 43

‘good earth.’ When these have been neglected the nation begins its decline and is on the way to spiritual decay.”15 Relating the results from a recent survey, Malcolm Dana noted that there was not exactly agreement on one singular plan for the nation’s rural churches, but that there was a clear understanding that “a primary element in a satisfactory national plan…must be a profound and initial appreciation of Spiritual values.”16 Although the problems facing rural churches had everything to do with broader social and economic trends, they could not be solved simply by addressing economics and sociology. A clearly religious method was needed, and this would involve, in the words of O.E. Baker,

“to convict people of sin, and save our civilization from death.”17

As the country began to climb out of the Depression, the HMC remained aware that farm tenancy was still a major problem. The HMC’s Committee on Town and

Country began to study this problem in earnest, holding a series of conferences to examine the relationship of tenancy to the church and community life. How could farm ownership be promoted to get people out of farm tenancy and sharecropping? What could churches do?

The participants at the HMC conferences argued strongly that land ownership was vital to a healthy society. But landowning could naturally be abused. At a 1941 conference in Nashville about conditions in the South, for instance, Richard Henry

Edwards described how a wealthy landowner exploiting sharecroppers was a condition

“as basically unstable as it is basically un-American, anti-social, and morally vicious.”18

Wilner J. Young noted that despite other forms of agricultural progress, “farm tenancy of

15 Home Missions Council, The Rural Church Today and Tomorrow, 7-8. 16 Home Missions Council, The Rural Church Today and Tomorrow, 54. 17 Quoted in ibid. 18 “The People, the Land, and the Church in the Rural South,” 208. 44 the degrading and depleting kind is still on the increase at an alarming rate.”19

Community problems stemming from unstable economic systems like tenancy could only be solved “through changes in feeling, attitudes, and understanding,” according to

Wayland J. Hayes. Churches could lead the way in modeling and teaching new values.20

Participants agreed that churches needed to promote agrarian values and not simply reproduce the existing social hierarchies. T.W. Spicer, representing Mt. Pleasant

Baptist Church, in Keene, Kentucky, argued that community stability (both within and outside the church) could not be ensured simply by relying on wealthy landowners. His church was comprised almost exclusively of sharecroppers and laborers, with only a few landowners. “Ten years ago the church had practically ceased to function,” he said. “But by a vigorous campaign to select church leaders on the basis of ability rather than land ownership, lines of demarcation have been broken down and a strong community center has been built up.”21 Howard Kester, representing the Fellowship of Southern

Churchmen, affirmed that rural churches had the obligation “to lead men to regard the earth as holy and to cultivate a reverence toward it,” and at the same time “to combat the exclusive ownership of the land by the few who rob the many of their God-given earth- right.”22 Edgar Wilson, at a 1943 conference about conditions in the West, described how the church could function as “an instrument of social democracy,” promoting a sense of family within society. “The farmer and the worker who fellowship together in the church[,] in social gatherings or in worship have the way paved for mutual understanding,” he said. The church could also promote an agriculture based on

19 “The People, the Land, and the Church in the Rural South,” 135. 20 “The People, the Land, and the Church in the Rural South,” 144. 21 “The People, the Land, and the Church in the Rural South,” 206. 22 “The People, the Land, and the Church in the Rural South,” 202. 45

“diversification of crops or rural industrial employment for off-seasons,” so that people could be assured of year-round labor. A church whose members treated each other like family would promote economic relationships that would benefit all members of that family.23

The Committee remained committed to the idea that farm ownership should be broadly available. In keeping with the general stream of Protestant agrarianism, the HMC championed the idea of the family farm. In 1948, the committee sponsored an ecumenical conference on the Protestant Program for the Family Farm, which attracted participants from the major mainline denominations, as well as colleges of agriculture and organizations like the Farm Foundation and the USDA. The conference report described the ideal family farm as one which would provide adequate labor and income for all the family members, allowing them not only to meet their physical needs but also to have educational, social, and religious outlets. The family farm should also, the conference agreed, “conserve and restore the physical resources of the farm,” attempting to make it both profitable and healthy for as long as possible.24

Although the conference recognized that maintaining a family farm was difficult in the United States, given the increasing rates of tenancy as well as the trends of farm consolidation and growth, the conference argued that the family farm was the best way to inculcate their desired Protestant agrarian values—“the constructive ideals and attitudes contributing to the growth of human personality and to the ultimate fulfillment of the will of God.” The conference argued that family farms were in fact the most progressive tools available for fulfilling this divine will. “The environment created by family farms, as

23 “The People, the Land, and the Church in the Rural West,” 159, 168, 169. 24 “A Protestant Program for the Family Farm,” 10. 46 defined by this conference” the participants argued, “is particularly conducive to expanding and strengthening these values, while trends toward the inadequate subsistence farms on the one side, and toward large-scale industrial farms on the other, would militate against the broadening and deepening of these values so essential for vigorous progress of modern societies.”25

In other words, a society based on small-scale family farms was not a return to the past but a way toward a better future. Family farms “provide a favorable environment for the development of a rich religious life, owing to constant awareness of the mysteries of life and of powers beyond man’s understanding which are provided for by the unfolding of nature, the concepts of the good and holy earth, if resources are properly used, opportunities for meditation in quietness and peace, and a feeling of dependence upon nature—upon a Creator with whom man can work.”26 The HMC clearly supported an agrarian vision of a country promoting spiritual and social abundance through small-scale family agriculture. Over time, the HMC became increasingly critical of the economic and social marginalization of farmers.

The Home Missions Council was not the only interdenominational organization to promote agrarianism. Other groups, like the Interchurch World Movement, also began to emphasize the importance of the rural church to the future of the nation. Though no other organization was as long-lived as the HMC, all ecumenical groups drew on the same

Progressive tradition. The Interchurch World Movement was founded in 1919 with the substantial backing of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Though it only existed for one year, it followed in Progressive tradition by being primarily concerned with carrying out

25 ibid., 14. 26 ibid., 15. 47 sociological studies of the health of rural churches. The findings from these studies led the group to strongly recommend closing large numbers of rural churches and consolidating the rest into cooperative units.27

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark reject the significance of any of these organizations, claiming that “not even a God-given sociology was able to produce any significant ecumenical movement among rural American Protestants.”28 Whether or not sociology was ordained by God, there was in fact a significant rural Protestant ecumenical movement.

This ecumenical movement, however, was not limited to the major bureaucratic organizations of mainline Protestantism. Though it initially used primarily the tools of social science to examine the nation’s rural challenges, the rural movement did not limit itself to fact-finding. The major thrust of the ecumenical Protestant rural movement was to develop educated religious workers who would commit themselves in various ways to rural life and rural communities. Working together, mainline Protestant denominations began to realize that the important thing to do was to work as close to the ground as possible. Struggling rural churches would need better people working in them. They would need educated pastors and devoted missionaries who could champion the agrarian vision.

Training the Rural Pastor: Missionaries and Ministers in Town and Country

In the 1920s, numerous American universities began earnestly offering courses and programs explicitly aimed at both rural pastors and missionaries working in rural

27 Madison, “Reformers and the Rural Church,” 654-58. 28 Finke and Stark, Churching of America, 216. 48 fields overseas. American universities had a complicated relationship to religion at the time. On the whole, universities were growing more secularized, with the unaffiliated research university model becoming increasingly dominant. Yet at the same time, numerous universities were experimenting with bringing religion explicitly into the curriculum, through “schools of religion” where religion would be studied academically as part of the liberal arts—the precursors to today’s departments of religious studies.29

State universities also had a close relationship with agriculture. The Morrill Act of

1862 had provided the endowment for a university of agriculture for each state, while the

Hatch Act of 1887 had provided federal funds for agricultural experiment stations in each state. The universities and the experiment stations would deliberately contribute to the productivity of American agriculture. The land-grant university system, in the early twentieth century, offered its expertise to the nation not only through research and teaching, but also through cooperative extension. The universities had a clear role in encouraging farmers to see themselves as businessmen and their farms as factories; Paul

Conkin concludes that without these structures, “the success of pre-1930 American agriculture would have been impossible.”30

But the agrarian message united churches and universities in a way that was not simply academic. Despite the universities’ commitment to science and industry, agrarianism offered an opportunity for these institutions to actively collaborate with the religious goals of mainline denominations. This collaboration took place most prominently in public state universities. Both university and church saw the growth of

29 Sloan, Faith and Knowledge, 19-28; Marsden, Soul of the American University, 338; Hart, University Gets Religion, 84-86. See also Cherry, Hurrying Toward Zion. 30 Conkin, Revolution Down on the Farm, 19; Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory; Kellogg and Knapp, The College of Agriculture; Hightower, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times, 1-15. 49 agrarianism as consistent with their social responsibilities, making the “agricultural missionary” a partnership between sacred and secular.

In 1914, Presbyterian leader Warren Wilson had argued that “the church has no need as a rule to teach agriculture, nor does the American church need to set up a school of soils and silos and animal husbandry, for this teaching is provided by the universities and by the government. But the church should provide the spirit in which this knowledge shall be used.”31 The partnerships that were developed between churches and universities demonstrate the reality of what Wilson envisioned. The impetus for the partnerships generally came from churches and religious organizations, while at the same time the universities extended their scientific expertise to individual pastors and missionaries.

Both institutions took advantage of what the other had to offer.

Summer Schools for Rural Pastors

The first way in which secular universities tried to extend assistance to the churches was through offering short courses for rural pastors. As early as the 1910s, some universities began operating summer schools aimed at ministers to give them supplementary training in topics that might be professionally useful. Michigan State held a short course in the summer of 1910, while Cornell University held a brief series of summer schools for pastors from 1911-1913.32 These were primarily experimental in nature and did not last long. In keeping with the denominational focus of pre-WWI rural

31 Wilson, Church at the Center, 30-31. 32 Charles Josiah Galpin to George Frederick Wells, July 8, 1941; Dwight Sanderson to George Frederick Wells, July 8, 1941; both in “History of Church Movement” accordion file, box 12, George Frederick Wells papers, #2141, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 50 work, it was primarily the denominations themselves that organized summer schools in the 1910s.

As with rural church work in general, the Presbyterian Church USA led the way in the summer school movement. In 1911, Warren Wilson helped organize three summer schools—at the University of Tennessee, Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and

Auburn Theological Seminary in New York—to provide additional academic training to rural Presbyterian ministers. Over the following years, the Presbyterians created dozens of other training schools at other universities, in 27 different states. The Methodist

Church created its own partnership programs beginning in 1918, which were received with enthusiasm: over a thousand Methodist pastors attended summer schools in 1919.33

Prominent Methodist institutions like Drew Theological Seminary (now Drew

University) joined the enthusiasm, offering summer courses for rural pastors on topics like agricultural economics, church history, and rural church finances.34 These had a broad curriculum; the 1921 school at Drew, for instance, included substantial course work in homiletics, exegesis, and principles of church building and renovation, in addition to sociology and church administration.35

These early denominational schools were well received. Ralph Mix, a pastor from

Ferron, Utah, attended a summer school in Estes Park, Colorado in 1913, and reported, “I believe I am somewhat capable now of impressing a country community with the sacredness of the farmer’s relation to the land. My ministry in Utah will be richer because

33 Ralph Felton, “Summer Schools for Town and Country Pastors,” box 4, folder 24, United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of National Missions Department of Mission Development Records, RG 301.7, PHS. 34 Drew University Bulletin 18:2 (March 25, 1930), 10-11; Summer Session of Drew University, May 20- June 7, 1929, 10-11; Drew University Bulletin 28:2 (1940), 40-41. 35 Drew Theological Seminary School for Rural Pastors program, May 23 to June 11, 1921, Felton papers 1920-1929 folder, box 1, Ralph Felton Papers, DUA. 51

I have more of an idea of right rural life.” Thomas Hanna, who attended a school in

Berkeley, California, in 1916, wrote to Warren Wilson that “The very gentleness of every speaker, the revelation of assurance that God’s will was fully manifested, the promptings and overflow of the Holy Spirit’s urgings and entreaties, the shekimah of unction and power upon each servant of the school, most profoundly admonished [us] to immediate preparedness for the Kingdom work and Lord’s glory in the whole earth.” H.W. Steen, of

Bentonville, Arkansas, was more to the point about his experience at the 1914

Fayetteville school: “It was simply great and all our fellows enjoyed it to the fullest.”36

These early experiments in offering “professional development” for rural ministers largely operated within the orbit of individual denominations. Although some of the universities that offered summer courses were secular, many were church-related or church-operated. In the 1920s, however, the primary emphasis of the summer school movement, like the rural church movement in general, became interdenominational. At the same time, secular universities, especially state universities, became much more involved with the rural church movement. Although some denominations continued to operate largely on their own (like the Episcopal Church, which had begun its own series of summer sessions for rural pastors in 1921, and had opened a clerical training institute at the University of Wisconsin in 192337), the major promoters of cooperation with universities from the 1920s onward were ecumenical organizations like the Home

Missions Council (HMC) and the Interchurch World Movement.

36 All three testimonials from box 4, folder 42, United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of National Missions Department of Mission Development Records. As the school at Estes Park suggests, not all early summer schools were necessarily held at universities. 37 Brown, Davidson, and Brown, Vision Fulfilling, 10-11. 52

The Home Missions Council strongly supported holding training schools at state universities with agricultural colleges. The HMC believed it shared ideals with the state university. The college of agriculture, it argued, “tends to emphasize the forces that unite a community and strives to find ways of correcting the community’s divisive factors.”38

A cooperative arrangement between the church and the academy, it argued, “links the rural church leadership with one of its greatest allies in rural community service—the

Agricultural Extension Service.” The HMC praised Extension for caring as much about

“the social and spiritual welfare of the farm family and the rural community” as it did the economic stability of farmers. Adding the expertise of academics from across the university, particularly in disciplines like economics and sociology, the university could offer pastors opportunities they would have difficulty finding elsewhere.39

State universities responded to the call to assist the rural church in impressive numbers. In 1930, for instance, the Home Missions Council recommended twelve schools for white pastors, being held at public universities like Purdue, Kansas State, the

University of Wisconsin, Virginia Tech, and Cornell, among others. It also, for the first time, endorsed ten schools for African American pastors, all in the south. Unlike the schools for whites, these were not held at public land-grant universities, which were for the most part still segregated. Instead, they were held at private historically black universities and religiously-affiliated institutions like Livingstone College (an AME Zion

38 Committee on Town and Country, “The Agricultural College Serving the Rural Church Leader,” box 17, folder 18, Home Missions Council of North America Records, NCC RG 26, PHS. 39 Home Missions Council, “Schools for Pastors at Work in Town and Country Fields 1930,” box 17, folder 14, Home Missions Council of North America Records, NCC RG 26, PHS. 53 college in Salisbury, NC), Samuel Huston College in Texas (now Huston-Tillotson

University), and Gulfside Assembly in Mississippi.40

Often the courses were intended for individuals to attend multiple years in a row; they would offer a curriculum of courses that developed over a three or four year sequence. The Penn State Short Course for Town and Country Pastors, for instance, was organized in a three-year cycle, with courses such as rural sociology, economics, psychology, community organization, and family life. Each morning, there were individual seminars at 8:00 and 9:00, divided among the first years, second years, and third years. All the students would then reassemble at 10:00 for a general session, and remain together in the afternoon for agricultural practicums. In 1942, the practicums taught ministers about vegetable gardening and animal husbandry, aimed at “those planning to produce at home a part of their food supply.”41

Denominations continued to support the summer schools both philosophically and financially. In 1951 the Evangelical United Brethren, for instance, spent about $1000 on scholarships for pastors to attend various summer training schools. That year the denomination awarded three scholarships to Green Lakes Training School for Rural

Ministers, three to the Garrett School for Rural Leaders, three to the Oberlin Graduate

School for Rural Leaders, nine to the Penn State School for Town and Country Pastors, and one scholarship to the Union Theological Seminary School for Rural Leaders.42 Two

40 Home Missions Council, “Schools for Pastors at Work in Town and Country Fields 1930,” box 17, folder 14, Home Missions Council of North America Records, NCC RG 26, PHS. 41 “Announcing the Fifth Annual Short Course for Town & Country Pastors, State College, Pa., June 15 to 19, 1942”; “Preliminary Program, Fifth Annual Short Course for Town & Country Pastors, at State College, Pennsylvania, June 15 to 19, 1942,” box 17, folder 14, Home Missions Council of North America Records, NCC RG 26, PHS. 42 Annual Report of Director of Town and Country Work, 1951, Commission on Town and Country Church Minutes and Reports 1951 folder, Records of the Evangelical United Brethren Church Board of Missions, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 54 years later, the EUB denomination awarded full scholarships for pastors to attend Garrett,

Oberlin, Emory, Cornell, the Iliff School of Theology, the Michigan State Rural Life

School, and Green Lake, and also gave out fifty smaller scholarships for even more pastors to attend state university short courses.43 This made for strong attendance at many schools. At Cornell, for instance, approximately sixty pastors from multiple denominations attended the summer school each year.44

Although interdenominational, these were clearly intended for mainline Protestant pastors. Methodist minister George Frederick Wells noted, for instance, that at the

Cornell University summer schools “in 1936 and 1937 whenever the ‘holy rollers,’ the

Free Methodists, the Pentacostals [sic], the Nazarines [sic], and similar cult groups were mentioned there was consternation in camp, an attitude of utter intolerance, loathing, and helplessness. The evident idea was that such religious phenomena were subnormal if not criminal and must not be permitted to exist.” Wells noted that a few years later those sentiments had cooled. Nevertheless, summer schools like Cornell’s helped reinforce the idea of the Protestant mainline as something different from the emotionalist evangelical groups.45

By the 1940s, choices were proliferating. In 1940, for instance, pastors could choose from eleven summer schools that would last at least two weeks (four of which would provide graduate credit), as well as twenty-three different shorter courses. Seven of these were specifically for African American clergy, while at least one advertised itself

43 Report of Director, EUB Commission on Town and Country Church, April 14, 1953, Commission on Town and Country Church Minutes and Reports 1953 folder, Records of the Evangelical United Brethren Church Board of Missions, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 44 Edwards, Cooperative Religion, 83. 45 George Frederick Wells, “Criteria By Which to Identify, Classify and Evaluate Program Projects in Country Church Work,” looseleaf manuscript, box 10, George Frederick Wells papers. 55 as specifically interracial—the Interdenominational-Interracial Ministers Institute for

New York and New England, held at Camp Barber in West Granville, Massachusetts.46

By 1946, in addition to ten long courses and twenty-four short courses, the HMC advertised nineteen denominational schools and training institutes that were also open to members of other denominations.47

Most of these pastoral training programs were primarily operated by and aimed at whites. Because of the essentially segregated nature of higher education, especially religious higher education, black church reformers and black colleges created their own separate programs for the training of missionaries. African American agrarianism operated in a parallel track to the dominant white agrarian movement. It was a much smaller movement, but worked for similar goals. Agrarianism was never as popular among blacks as it was among whites, however. For too many black farmers, farming was not a choice. Especially in the South, sharecropping and tenant farming trapped many African Americans in poverty against their will. It was difficult for black progressives to laud agrarian values when so many black farmers dreamed of escaping.

When black farmers did organize to protect rural ways of life and work, it was more likely to be in a Pentecostal context, or within the Garveyite movement, than in mainline

Protestant denominations.48

Still, as early as 1911, following in the footsteps of black extension agents, black progressives began explicitly focusing on the training of black clergy for service in rural areas. The Phelps-Stokes Fund was endowed in 1911 at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama,

46 “Continuing Education for the Minister in Town and Country 1940,” box 17, folder 14, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 47 “In-Service Training for the Minister in Town and Country 1946,” box 17, folder 14, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 48 Roll, Spirit of Rebellion. 56 though it also provided funds for training at other black institutions. The Phelps-Stokes fund helped pay for pastoral institutes and clerical training programs.49

Other institutions also began dedicating resources to training black clergy. At times, these efforts did work across racial lines. At Drew Theological Seminary (now

Drew University), Ralph A. Felton became one of the nation’s most visible promoters of rural life and Protestant agrarianism. Felton, who had begun his career in rural sociology at Cornell in 1923, came to Drew in 1931. There he instituted a program for training rural pastors. Felton and many of his students were white, but he was especially committed to the training of black pastors. Felton sent dozens of ministerial students into rural black churches as part of their training, and interacted with perhaps thousands of African

American pastors in summer classes and institutes at Drew.50

By the 1940s, efforts were made to formally open rural church departments in black seminaries and universities across the country. By 1945, Shaw University in

Raleigh, North Carolina, had formalized plans for a department, and discussions were underway at Virginia Union University, Fisk University, Hood Seminary at Livingstone

College, and Philips School of Theology at Lane College (a Christian Methodist

Episcopal college in Jackson, TN).51

The summer schools for rural pastors were an important way in which Protestant denominations sought to instill the agrarian values of rural reform among the people, rather than simply implementing them through the official denominational structure.

Training pastors to more fully embrace rural church positions, and giving them technical

49 Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land, 218. 50 Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land, 234. 51 “Plans for Rural Church Departments in Negro Seminaries,” September 15, 1945, folder 15, box 16, Home Missions Council of North America Records, NCC RG 26, PHS. 57 tools to allow them to understand their parishioners’ lives, was a method that allowed individuals to take a greater responsibility for rural reform.

Cooperation Between Seminaries and State Universities

By the 1940s, relationships between universities and churches had been strong for decades. With universities displaying their growing interest in creating offerings for the nation’s rural pastors, and pastors responding with enthusiasm, religious institutions realized they also needed to do a better job of targeting rural clergy. In 1929, at a conference in Boston that attempted to organize a New England Town and Country

Church Commission, Malcolm Dana, one of the most visible ruralists within the

Congregational Church, had argued that ministers and seminaries had to take a stronger hand in supporting rural churches. In words that Wendell Berry would echo nearly seventy years later, he argued that young ministers had to “stop using the country church as a meal ticket,” as just a way to earn a living, rather than a vital and intrinsically worthwhile calling. But at the same time, Dana said, seminaries needed to do a better job of relating education to the practical challenges of working in a rural field.52

By the end of the next decade, while partnerships between pastorates and universities proliferated, seminaries too had begun to reach out to secular universities for assistance with topics they themselves could not teach. In 1933, for instance, Cornell

University came to an agreement with Colgate-Rochester Seminary and Auburn

Seminary, under which Cornell would enroll seminary students as graduate students for one or two semesters, to take courses that they could then apply to their degree program

52 Minutes of meeting to organize a New England Town and Country Church Commission, Boston, Jan. 28, 1929, 2, folder 11, box 23, Kenyon L. Butterfield papers, 1889-1945, UMA. 58 in the seminary. The expectation was that male seminary students would enroll in programs like agricultural economics, rural sociology, extension, or agricultural science, while female seminary students would enroll in programs like education, extension, nutrition, biology, landscape design, or health and hygiene.53 A number of students who participated in this program went on to prominent positions within their churches, including one who became the director of rural work at a seminary in India, and another who became a national field secretary for rural Baptist churches.54

The idea of yoking together state universities and seminaries received national attention in 1939, when a Conference of Colleges of Agriculture and Theological Schools was formed, under the direction of David Lindstrom, professor of rural sociology at the

University of Illinois, and Paul Vogt of the USDA Extension Service. The Conference brought together representatives from seminaries, state universities, churches, denominational offices, and the USDA.55

One of the first projects that the Conference developed was a plan for state universities to create a “pre-theological major.” This new major would allow agriculture students to take substantial coursework in both science and humanities departments, in preparation for applying to a master’s program in a seminary and then entering ministry.

In addition to completing the minimum requirements of the college of agriculture, which would provide a strong scientific background, the pre-theological student was encouraged to take basic courses in agricultural economics, public speaking, psychology, rural

53 “Training for Rural Religious Workers,” folder 11, box 5, Carl E. Ladd papers, #21-2-87, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 54 Hugh Anderson Moran to the Board of Directors of Auburn Theological Seminary, June 27, 1942, Worship folder, box 2, Hugh Anderson Moran papers, #39-2-972, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 55 Thomas Alfred Tripp, “Conference of Colleges of Agriculture and Theological Schools: A Resume,” 1-2, box 17, folder 7, Home Missions Council of North America Records, NCC RG 26, PHS. 59 sociology, English, and history. This presented a contrast to the suggestions of the

American Association of Theological Schools, which recommended that seminary applicants take the majority of their undergraduate credits in subjects like philosophy, languages, English, and religion, with fewer credits in sciences.56

The proposal met with considerable success. Although a few schools were skeptical about low enrollment numbers, the Conference emphasized that even a few students each year, at each university, could add up to a significant effect. “It is not an enrollment issue,” emphasized the Conference, but a cooperative effort on the part of agricultural colleges for the improvement of rural life.”57

By 1943, 22 major state colleges of agriculture had accepted the Conference’s plan, developing a pre-theological major along the lines suggested by the Conference.58

Kentucky’s course catalog, for instance, informed students in the College of Agriculture and Home Economics that, if they had future seminary plans, they “may select from the general University offering a suitable group of courses in philosophy, English literature, and ancient languages.”59 The University of Wisconsin expected pre-theology students to

“follow the general plan of the Social Science major suggested above”—a curriculum made up mostly of economics and sociology courses—while being sure to take “at least one basic course in each of the following fields: Agricultural Economics, Economics

56 Tripp, “Conference of Colleges,” appendix B, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 57 Minutes of the Fourth Conference on Cooperation Between Theological Seminaries and Colleges of Agriculture, Nov 6, 1940, 7, Rural Institute folder, box 3, Hugh Anderson Moran papers. 58 The universities were Wisconsin, Texas A&M, University of New Hampshire, Colorado A&M (now Colorado State), University of Connecticut, Kansas State, University of Nebraska, Iowa State, Michigan State, New Mexico A&M (now New Mexico State), State College of Washington, Mississippi State, Cornell University, Ohio State, University of Minnesota, Oregon State, Virginia Tech, University of Illinois, University of California-Berkeley, University of Missouri, University of Kentucky, and Penn State. Tripp, “Conference of Colleges,” appendix A, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 59 University of Kentucky, General Catalog 1945-46 (Bulletin of the University of Kentucky 38:5), 87, http://kdl.kyvl.org/catalog/xt7hqb9v1s28_91/text (accessed June 24, 2013). 60

(general), English Literature, History and Government, Philosophy, Psychology, Public

Speaking, Sociology, and Rural Sociology.”60

At the same time, the Conference secured assurances from seminaries around the country that they would in fact accept graduates of state agricultural colleges. The

Conference received replies from 59 seminaries in 20 states, the vast majority of which pledged their willingness to cooperate and to promote the plan in their course catalogs.

Of the 59 seminaries canvassed, only a few urban schools refused to cooperate—Harvard

Divinity School and Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Crane Theological

School at Tufts University, Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, and Western

Theological Seminary (now Pittsburgh Theological Seminary).61

The general response of seminaries toward graduates from state universities was positive. At a 1944 meeting, one seminary representative exclaimed, “Electrical engineers are doing excellent seminary work—even in Greek and Hebrew!”62 But the

Conference realized that the war was making things difficult. In 1944, only about half of the universities offering the pre-theological major had students enrolled in the major— although most of the colleges maintained that they were hoping for better in the future.63

The Conference continued to discuss ways to promote agricultural education and rural work in universities and seminaries. It acknowledged, however, that providing clergy with agricultural training in settings like the pre-theological major was not intended to turn them into professional agriculturalists. It did “want them to understand

60 University of Wisconsin, College of Agriculture Announcement of Courses: 1942-1944 (July 1942), 226, http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/WI.AnnouCour4244 (accessed June 24, 2013). 61 Tripp, “Conference of Colleges,” appendix D, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 62 Minutes of Conference on Cooperation Between Theological Seminaries and Colleges of Agriculture, Eastern District, April 1, 1944, 4, box 17, folder 7, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 63 Thomas Alfred Tripp, “Present Status of the Pre-Theological Major in Colleges of Agriculture,” appendix to Minutes of Conference on Cooperation Between Theological Seminaries and Colleges of Agriculture, Eastern District, April 1, 1944, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 61 enough about farming and rural life to be able to give general agricultural guidance and encourage church members to use agricultural services.”64 This was a key part of the agrarian ideal—everyone, no matter their position in society, had a relationship to the land. Everyone would benefit from even limited awareness of agricultural issues. For pastors serving in rural areas, although their primary work was religion, an ability to discuss agricultural concerns with their parishioners would help cement the agrarian community together.

The Cornell University School for Missionaries

One of the most prominent partnerships between church and university took place at Cornell University. Although Cornell was widely criticized at its founding for its commitment to nonsectarianism—its critics attacked it as a “godless” place—the university remained open to the presence and influence of religion. Ezra Cornell himself had stated at the inauguration of the university in 1868 that part of the mission of the new university was “preparing [students] to serve society better, training them to be more useful in their relations to the state, and to better comprehend their higher and holier relations to their families and their God. It shall be our aim and our constant effort,” he said, “to make true Christian men, without dwarfing or paring them down to fit the narrow gauge of any sect.”65 As former University President Livingston Farrand put it in

1939, “There was, therefore, from the day of its founding an officially friendly attitude toward any sincere religious belief, but never an acceptance of responsibility for the

64 “Summary of Conference, Rural Church Leaders and Representatives of Agencies of U.S. Department of Agriculture,” March 12-13, 1946, 3, box 17, folder 18, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 65 Quoted in Edwards, Cooperative Religion, 14. 62 nurture of any particular creed or set of beliefs.”66 Moreover, due to Cornell’s legacy as the home of American nature-study, and the continued presence on campus of Liberty

Hyde Bailey, Cornell was a logical place to turn for groups interested in the rural church.

In 1924, joining other colleges of agriculture, the Cornell Department of Rural

Social Organization began offering a summer school for rural pastors. In 1934, Cornell created a Rural Institute for Religious Workers, which studied struggling rural areas and made recommendations for community programs such as cooperative parishes.67

Cornell’s most distinctive contribution, however, was to begin offering short courses not only for pastors but also for missionaries who were home in the United States on furlough. These short courses embraced a wide variety of topics that Cornell faculty felt were important for missionaries, but one of the primary goals was to educate missionaries more concretely in agriculture. By taking a “crash course” in agriculture at Cornell, missionaries could engage more directly with the people they served in their mission fields, and provide not only religion but also technical assistance with agriculture itself.68

Cornell approached teaching these agricultural missionaries with a scientific spirit. As one of the school’s promotional brochures put it, “The long history of missionary endeavor is replete with cases where progress has been stopped by failure of food crops and by epidemics of disease caused by insects, or by lack of sanitary engineering. So the thoughtful missionary attempts to discover the limiting factors that are concerned with all the efforts of his community to build for the more Abundant

66 Foreword to Edwards, Cooperative Religion, ix. 67 Edwards, Cooperative Religion, 83. On cooperative parish programs, see below, chapter 2. 68 Ruby Green Smith, The People’s Colleges: A History of the New York State Extension Service in Cornell University and the State, 1876-1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1949), 488. 63

Life.”69 Extension instructor Charles A. Taylor insisted that “we hope that the course will serve as leaven for the loaf of agricultural understanding.”70 In other words, by helping missionaries gain technical knowledge about agriculture, Cornell saw itself contributing to its mission as a Morrill land-grant institution. “The problems of agriculture and rural life are the problems of all people,—especially the problems of missionaries. They are the factors which may help or hinder the development of any community.”71

Understanding and sympathy were the primary goals of the course’s instruction, because there could be no hope of turning the missionaries into farming experts in such a short period of time. The diversity of world agriculture was a particular challenge. “I doubt if there is anyone who has such a fund of knowledge that he would be able to teach the agriculture of all of the countries from which missionaries come to attend the Cornell

School for Missionaries,” Charles Taylor wrote. “However, there are certain fundamentals that underlie the growth of plants and animals the world over,” and even this kind of general knowledge would help missionaries relate to the local people in their mission fields. Taylor described his course on agriculture for the missionaries as an attempt simply “to acquaint the missionaries with the processes of growth, and with agriculture, in order that they may better understand the basis of the agricultural processes by which persons to whom they are ministering get their living from the soil.”72

The first Cornell School for Missionaries was held in 1930, with the cooperation of the International Missionary Council and the Boards of Foreign Missions. It ran for

69 Cornell School for Missionaries brochure, 1938, box 1, folder 2, Cornell School for Missionaries records, #21-34-1476, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 70 Charles A. Taylor, “A Course in the Elements of Agriculture in the Cornell School for Missionaries on Furlough,” 1938, folder 3, box 2, Cornell School for Missionaries records, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 71 Cornell School for Missionaries brochure, 1938, Cornell School for Missionaries records, CUL. 72 Taylor, A Course in the Elements of Agriculture,” Cornell School for Missionaries records, CUL. 64 four weeks in the winter. Students took classes on rural sociology, rural education, and agriculture. The agriculture course, taught by county extension agent Lincoln Kelsey, was an introduction to basic scientific agriculture, using a typical college textbook, and also included some extension methods that could be used in the mission field. Along with regular daily coursework in the mornings, attending missionaries had the opportunity to visit local churches, schools, and farms in the afternoons, as well as engage in roundtable-style discussions in the evenings.73 In 1931, a course in nutrition was added, and in later years the school added courses on family life and human development, and missionary principles. From 1932 onward, the fourth week of the school coincided with

Farm and Home Week. Instead of classes, missionaries were invited to attend any of five hundred lectures being offered all week long on a wide variety of rural topics.74

The school was strongly supported by the major ecumenical missions organizations. It received endorsements from the Foreign Missions Conference of North

America, and assistance from the Rural Missions Cooperating Committee, as well as

Agricultural Missions, Inc. All missionaries accepted for the school received free tuition.75

The 1930 school had 15 full-time students and four who attended on a part-time basis. Six of them were Canadian and one was from England. The students were members of multiple denominations and societies: the United Church of Canada, the

American Board of Foreign Missions, the United Christian Missionary Society,

Presbyterians, Methodists, Reformed, Congregationalists, and Quakers. However, the

73 Cornell School for Missionaries on Furlough brochure, 1930, box 1, folder 2, Cornell School for Missionaries records, CUL. 74 School for Missionaries brochures, box 1, folder 2, Cornell School for Missionaries records, CUL. 75 School for Missionaries brochure, 1936, box 1, folder 2, Cornell School for Missionaries records, CUL. 65 first few years of the school failed to draw significant numbers of students. In 1931, only ten missionaries registered for the course; fifteen participated in 1932, and enrollment dropped to seven in 1933.76

Not surprisingly, the organizers of the school found these results underwhelming.

In 1932, John Reisner lamented that the young school at Cornell had not attracted nearly as many missionaries “as the value of the School warrants.”77 Still, officials believed in the value of what they were doing. As professor of rural sociology Dwight Sanderson put it in 1933, “So far as we are aware, no other institution has attempted to give

[missionaries] special work on agriculture and rural life. Nor do we think there is any other institution in the East which is equipped to do this work as we are at Cornell.”78

Though numbers rebounded—in 1938 there were 78 missionaries enrolled—there remained mixed feelings about the curriculum of the school and the degree to which topics could be adequately covered in the time allotted.79 Robert Spencer, a missionary serving in rural Japan, called the school’s curriculum “happily balanced between general theory and specific application.” He claimed that Cornell made up for the deficiencies he had received in his theological school education, which had not prepared him for working on the ground in the mission field.80 On the other hand, Marie Belle Fowler, professor of family life, reported in 1936 that “Both the missionaries and we felt that the time was too

76 Charles A Taylor to C.E. Ladd, 5/6/1942, box 1, folder 1, Cornell School for Missionaries records, CUL; registration lists, box 1, folder 2, Cornell School for Missionaries records. 77 John A. Reisner, “Twenty-Five Years of Rural Missions, 1907-1932,” 7. NCC Division of Overseas Ministries records, 1914-1972, NCC RG 8, box 67 folder 13, PHS. 78 Dwight Sanderson to Carl E. Ladd, June 9, 1933, box 1, folder 1, Cornell University School for Missionaries records, CUL. 79 Numbers from Ninth Annual Cornell School for Missionaries Directory, Annual Cornell School for Missionaries 1930-1940 folder, box 4, Dwight Sanderson papers, #21-33-73, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 80 Robert Spencer to John R. Edwards, February 21, 1933, box 1, folder 3, Cornell University School for Missionaries records, CUL. 66 short to accomplish that which we wished. For instance, the missionaries wanted more time for reading in the library and for becoming acquainted with the various sources.

They also wanted time for fun, music, recreation and the like.”81 The general balance between immediate practical knowledge and academic expertise seems to have been a particular challenge. Professor W.A. Anderson reported in 1942 that the school still needed “to work out a satisfactory way to give the missionaries enough basic information about the problems of technical agriculture so that they will have an appreciation of the value of scientific work in this field.”82

Some missionaries emerged from the school particularly surprised at what they had not learned. In 1943, Nina M. Stallings, who was stationed in Chengdu, China, reported that she had been talking with the local goat farmers in her area. It turned out, according to Stallings, that the Chinese farmers did not use the milk of the goats.

Stallings tried to demonstrate, but reported that “I had to admit that even with all my education and re-education I still could not milk a goat.” Neither, apparently, could the local farmers. Although Stallings had taken a course on caring for goats at the Cornell school, it had not given her the hands-on experience she needed. Stallings wrote to

Cornell that “at least in this one small particular, the unit on the ‘Care of Goats’ is incomplete and should be improved by requiring every student to be able to milk a goat.”83

81 Marie Belle Fowler to John A. Reisner, March 7, 1936, box 12, folder 20, New York State College of Home Economics records, #23-2-749, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 82 W.A. Anderson to Charles Taylor, May 7, 1942, box 1, folder 1, Cornell University School for Missionaries records, CUL. 83 Letter from Nina M. Stallings, January 12, 1943, box 1, folder 3, Cornell University School for Missionaries records, CUL. 67

Ambiguous as the education at the School for Missionaries might have been, many alumni of the program became major champions of the school. One Congregational missionary who had attended the school addressed that denomination’s Board of

Missions in 1937, arguing that at least half of all missionaries ought to attend the Cornell school, and if possible some of them should study at Cornell for a full semester or even two.84 Missionaries from the 1937 school unanimously approved a statement, sent to the colleges of agriculture and home economics, expressing their “sincere appreciation of the many privileges which we have enjoyed as students; of the deep personal interest which so many members of the faculty have taken in on diverse problems; of the genuinely friendly atmosphere of the colleges wherever we went; and of the spirit of service which was so generally and pervadingly evident.”85

Others agreed. Wilbur Lyon, a missionary from Ohio, reported that he was particularly impressed with the way attending students were made to feel welcome in the university community—despite being different from the typical student body. Although

Cornell was not, of course, sectarian in any way, the faculty “never questioned the central motive and purpose of missions,” but instead simply contributed their own professional expertise. “The great value of the course, as I see it,” Lyon reported, “is in showing what things are involved in the best kind of uplift of the home and country life; giving us enough comprehension of detail to enable us to know what we can do ourselves for our people in India and elsewhere, and in what matters we should seek the cooperation of experts….The Cornell School has not turned evangelists into agriculturalists but made us

84 John A. Reisner to Carl E. Ladd, March 12, 1937, box 12, folder 2, Carl E. Ladd papers, #21-2-87, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 85 Resolution of Appreciation, 1937, box 12, folder 2, Carl E. Ladd papers, CUL. 68 able to be better evangelists, striving to bring Christ more effectively into contact with many of those who cannot see now far beyond their immediate material needs.”86

When the United States entered World War II, participation in the school dropped dramatically. Dangerous situations overseas reduced the immediately viability of many missions projects, and many missionaries were pulled from the field. In 1943, the leadership of the Cornell school realized it could not hold the summer school again.

Participation in 1942 had been low enough to raise doubts about the future health of the program—only 16 missionaries attended. Extension professor Charles Taylor suggested it could be done for at least twenty students, but the numbers were not forthcoming. That year, the school was cancelled.87

The leadership was severely disappointed at the cancellation. Carl Ladd, dean of the college of agriculture, said he “should be very sorry to see it discontinued.”88 John

Reisner believed that if the school was never reinstated it “would be a calamity.”89 Hazel

Hauck, professor of nutrition, argued that “the effectiveness of the short course cannot be measured entirely in terms of the number of registrants…I wish to indicate my willingness to continue to make this contribution toward world friendship, and better living on the farms in far places, even though registration may be small during the war

86 Wilbur H. Lyon to Robert E. Speer, February 26, 1935, box 1, folder 3, Cornell University School for Missionaries records, CUL. 87 Charles A. Taylor to Carl E. Ladd, October 1, 1942, box 23, folder 66, Carl E. Ladd papers, CUL. Enrollment figure is from Charles A Taylor to Carl E. Ladd, May 6, 1942, box 1, folder 1, Cornell University School for Missionaries records, CUL. 88 Carl E. Ladd to Charles A. Taylor, October 6, 1942, box 23, folder 66, Carl E. Ladd papers, CUL. 89 John A. Reisner to Charles A. Taylor, May 20, 1942, box 1, folder 1, Cornell University School for Missionaries records, CUL. 69 period.”90 Fortunately for its supporters, the school reopened in 1944, with twenty-two missionaries in attendance.91

Other Missionary Schools

Other universities around the country followed the lead of Cornell in providing educational opportunities for missionaries home on furlough. Iowa State University

(Iowa’s land grant university) opened a school for missionaries in 1939. The first short course, held in February, attracted missionaries from seven different denominations, although it was dominated by Methodists and Presbyterians.92 Like Cornell’s school, the

Iowa school was also not intended to produce professional agriculturalists out of missionaries, but to train them in the basic realities that their subjects faced. “The primary objective of the school,” read one brochure, “will be to help those in attendance gain a clearer understanding of the more fundamental principles on which the individual and social welfare of rural people is based and to provide more tools with which missionaries may minister to the life and well-being of their constituents.”93 Oregon State University, in Corvallis, held its first school for missionaries in 1941, with 20 attendees.94 “There are

B.A.’s, B.S.’s, B.D.’s, R.N.’s, M.A.’s, M.S.’s, Ph.D.’s and M.D.’s of all ages, single and

90 Hazel M. Hauck to Carl E. Ladd, May 12, 1942, box 1, folder 1, Cornell University School for Missionaries Records, CUL. 91 Press release, January 14, 1944, box 3, folder 5, Cornell University School for Missionaries Records, CUL. 92 R.M. Vifquain to Betty Austin, February 25, 1939, folder 5, box 1, Cornell University School for Missionaries records, CUL. 93 “Announcing the Third Annual Iowa School for Missionaries,” 1941, folder 5, box 1, Cornell University School for Missionaries records, CUL. 94 Foreign Missions Conference of North America, Report of the Forty-Eighth Annual Session, Trenton New Jersey January 1942, 59. Foreign Missions Conference folder, box 3, Missions Archive (Missions Biographical and Organizations collection), IC. 70 married!” exclaimed a report on the school, which also noted that the missionaries were both men and women.95

Following the lead of these universities was Scarritt College for Christian

Workers, a Southern Methodist institution in Nashville. The school primarily trained graduates for service and ordination in the Methodist church, and it did so with a major emphasis on rural work.96 In 1934, Scarritt began sending its ministerial students into field work in rural areas. The students were in general extremely well received, and the college began receiving unsolicited requests from rural communities asking for students to come to them.97

In 1936, Scarritt purchased an old farm in Crossville, Tennessee and in cooperation with various denominational agencies from the Methodist Church, South, began work revitalizing it. The college built a number of new buildings on the farm— including two barns, a poultry house, and a granary—hired a small professional staff, and began demonstrating crops and dairy techniques.98 The rebuilt farm was christened

Scarritt College Rural Center. Deaconess Sarah McCracken was placed in charge of the

Rural Center’s work.99 McCracken was a strong proponent of the importance of rural church work. “Rural Work includes not only building up the program within the rural church itself,” she wrote, “but it includes vitally in relating that church to the

95 Rural Missions Cooperating Committee, “Announcing the 1941 Schools for Missionaries,” folder 5, box 1, Cornell University School for Missionaries records, CUL. 96 Tatum, Crown of Service, 303-317. 97 Jean Rowland, “Student Work in Rural Tennessee,” World Outlook August 1941, 16-18, folder 1, Catherine Ezell Collection, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 98 “For the Committee of Evaluation, Scarritt College Rural Center,” Scarritt College Rural Center and Cumberland County Rural Work, Crossville, Tennessee, Administration and Workers, 1941-1950 folder, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 99 Tatum, Crown of Service, 296-297. 71 community.”100 Each term, a small number of Scarritt students would be in residence at the center and assigned to field work positions at rural churches in the area, in order to study the connections between church and community.101

It was important to Scarritt that students be required to work in interracial settings. White students were regularly assigned to work with African American churches in the region. For many it was the first time they had ever interacted with black people— which forced students to confront their own prejudices. One white student from

Mississippi had difficulty at first with shaking hands with black people at the church she was assigned, but found she enjoyed playing with the children. Another white student reported more positively that she felt like “a real part” of the black church: “Now I’ve actually worked with Negroes so closely,” she said, “I can tell people what I believe about racial equality and can back it up with actual experience.”102

In addition to providing opportunities for regular Scarritt students, the center followed the other universities’ examples in enrolling missionaries from overseas. Each spring, beginning in 1940, the center held a six-week short course for missionaries, commonly receiving anywhere between fifteen and forty attendees. In addition to taking classes at the center, attendees would regularly visit other centers for rural education throughout the South.103 In 1946, for instance, the missionaries in the Center’s short course came from nine different denominations and had been serving in over ten different countries (including India, Liberia, Iran, and Japan). They received instruction in

100 Sarah McCracken, “Christ and the Rural Billion: The Philosophy of Rural Work,” Methodist Woman July 1941, 16, folder 1, Catherine Ezell Collection, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 101 Rosemary Nixon typescript, Scarritt College Rural Work Administration 1953-1963 folder, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 102 Rosemary Nixon typescript, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 103 “For the Committee of Evaluation, Scarritt College Rural Center,” Scarritt College Rural Center and Cumberland County Rural Work, Crossville, Tennessee, Administration and Workers, 1941-1950 folder, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 72 agriculture, educational methods, anthropology, and family life issues. “[T]hese missionaries have been introduced to new ideas concerning seed, soil, poultry, and livestock,” a report of the short course ran; “they have learned to use their hands in weaving, in woodwork, and in building. They have an immediate and helpful approach to the home, the farm, the village community.”104

One of the key parts of the Scarritt program was a period of travel during which missionaries could see examples of rural education and demonstration projects. The attendees at the 1940 school traveled 1800 miles in a chartered bus, visiting Tuskegee

Institute, Spellman College, Berea College, and demonstration projects overseen by the

Congregational and Presbyterian churches in Cumberland Mountains. They toured parts of the federal Tennessee Valley Authority project as well. One missionary reported that the travel portion of the short course was a “huge success.”105

Missionary Training in the Government

Although universities, and especially state universities, were the primary catalysts behind training rural missionaries in agriculture, the federal government became involved as well. In 1945, the USDA Extension Service started an Extension Education Workshop aimed at missionaries heading overseas. The first workshop, which ran for ten days in

February, attracted twenty-nine missionaries. The workshop “consisted of extension demonstrations, extension methods and principles, leadership training, organization and measuring the results of extension activities.” It was extremely well-received, both by the

104 Hugh Stuntz, “Effective Rural Missions,” World Outlook August 1946, 27-28, folder 1, Catherine Ezell Collection, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 105 “The Short-Term School for Rural Missionaries,” Scarritt College Voice, 12:4 (Winter, 1940), 8-9, folder 5, box 1, Cornell University School for Missionaries records, CUL. 73 missionaries (some of whom stated that it was “the greatest educational experience which they had ever had”) and by the Extension Service itself.106 The USDA short course for missionaries was repeated throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. Over time the federal

Extension Service began to cooperate with state extension schools in order to strengthen its ability to offer effective training. In 1950, for instance, in addition to the short course held in Washington, D.C., the Extension Service sponsored seven additional missionaries, who began their study at a regional extension summer school at the

University of Arkansas, followed by “6 weeks of practical training under county extension agents in four Southern States.”107

A post-workshop survey and report from 1962 showed that the majority of the participating missionaries were pleased with the results of the workshop. Fifty-eight percent of the missionaries surveyed rated the overall workshop as “excellent,” with another thirty-seven percent rating it “good.” The remaining five percent marked it “all right,” but no one rated it either “mediocre” or “no good.” The missionaries as a group were most pleased with the workshop’s training in writing and communication, but agreed that more time was needed to address the specifics of project planning and evaluation. The Extension Service repeatedly heard that the missionaries would have appreciated “more time to develop realistic plans, whereby principles and methods learned in the seminar could be applied to their missionary situation.” This need was identified by twelve of the 19 missionaries surveyed. If the Extension Service staff had

106 “Looking Ahead With Agricultural Missions,” folder 14, box 67, NCC Division of Overseas Ministries records, 1914-1972, NCC RG 8, PHS. 107 Ira W. Moomaw, “The Year in Agricultural Missions: Report to the Board of Directors for the Year 1956-1957,” folder 15, box 67, NCC Division of Overseas Ministries records, NCC RG 8, PHS; USDA Extension Service, “Report of Cooperative Extension Work in Agriculture and Home Economics 1950.” Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1950. See other USDA Extension Service annual reports from 1946-1951. 74 known more about the specific challenges faced by the missionaries in their particular fields, the missionaries felt, the workshop could have been more directly tailored to their needs. Nevertheless, the missionaries identified a strong sense of “fellowship and mutual sharing” between the participants, and the “excellent cooperation, interest and enthusiasm” of the Extension Service staff.108

Rural Home Missions: The Methodist Church

Most of the missionaries that enrolled in the training courses, both in universities and in the government, were serving overseas. The short courses were therefore deeply invested in extending American ideals and knowledge about agriculture to developing nations. However, there was also a desire to develop missionaries for the domestic church. Saving rural churches and rural communities in the United States would require not only an educated pastorate but also dedicated home missionaries. These missionaries would work in some of the most difficult (and poorest) parts of the country, trying to instill the agrarian values that mainline denominations championed.

The Methodist Church, for example, created a “new order of lay missionaries” in the early 1940s, people who were intended to remain permanently in rural positions.

They would live on church-owned farms and engage in rural communities in a long-term way. “They will be farmer-preachers,” the church proclaimed, “permanently residing in the community and sharing all the duties and responsibilities as citizens.” Although the missionaries would be expected to earn as much as possible of their income from the produce of their farm, the Methodist Church would make up the difference in order to

108 USDA Federal Extension Service, “Evaluation of Annual Seminar on Extension Education for Agricultural Missionaries,” 1962, Agricultural Work Folder, Mission Geographical Reference Files, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 75 assure them a guaranteed income. There was no set qualification for such a position, but the church preferred if possible that missionaries would have an undergraduate degree from a college of agriculture and a graduate degree from a seminary.109

Not all rural home missionaries, however, were expected to remain forever in their posts. Most were contracted for specific periods of time, although some certainly developed a certain sympathy for the locals. This did not mean that the expectations for their actual work were any less lofty, however. Missionary work embraced all aspects of the rural church and community. The ideal Methodist rural missionary, for instance, was tasked with “developing a wholesome community life,” as one writer put it. “Hers is a motivating influence which leads all persons in the community to work together in meeting the spiritual, physical, social, and educational opportunities.”110

Most Methodist rural missionaries were young women. A study of Methodist rural missionaries done in the early 1960s showed that the majority of the women were in their twenties and had only recently graduated from college.111 They stood in a historical tradition of Progressive women working in poor communities in occupations such as education and health care.112

Upon arriving at their posts, the missionaries were confronted with the realities of poverty in rural America. In 1969, Pauline Precise, taking up a post in Lake County,

Tennessee, was told that the first thing she would need to do would be to teach “the basic rules of sanitation” to the local residents. Precise visited a Sunday school where she met

109 Methodist Church Editorial Department, “Rural Strategy,” folder 18, box 17, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 110 Mrs. Vernon Bradley, “Occupation—Rural Worker,” folder 2, Catherine Ezell Collection, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 111 Martha D. Pierce, untitled typescript, Workshop for Rural Church & Community Workers 1961 folder, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 112 Flynt, “‘Feeding the Hungry and Ministering to the Broken Hearted’”; Harper, Quality of Mercy; McDowell, Social Gospel in the South. 76

“little kids who looked so bright and happy, and then kids about 10 or 12 who had a far away look in their eye, shoulders slumped.” Writing to a close friend, she confided,

“Connie, something must be done in this area and I’m not sure what or who should start.”113 Mrs. Raymond Mitchell, writing to the denomination in 1963 to request a missionary, described the plight of people near Tiptonville, Tennessee: “We visited only one woman who can read. We went into one ‘home’ where the mother, who is only twenty-four, already has eight children and is pregnant again, and has only one bed, a half-size mattress on a wooden frame and a heap of rags – filthy rags – in the corner on which several children sleep. You ask, ‘Why this condition?’ Mostly as the result of mechanization in this area of cotton farming which has replaced cotton-choppers and sharecroppers, and has left the unskilled laborers without means of making a living.”114

Elsewhere, missionaries saw the challenges that faced the church in particular.

“When one makes a visit to some of the rural churches in this Conference,” wrote

Rebecca Busch, a volunteer worker from Detroit serving in the Arkansas-Oklahoma

Conference, “it is easy to see why our ministers sometimes become easily discouraged.

Many of the church buildings are really unfit for worship, and the memberships are struggling along trying to carry on a church program and to serve and worship God.”115

It was important to home missionaries to make a home in the places they were posted. Loraine Heath was assigned to the churches of Itawamba County, Mississippi, in the fall of 1954. She acknowledged that the most important thing at first was to truly

113 Pauline Precise to Cornelia Russell, 2/2/1965, Historical – West Tennessee-Kentucky 1955-1965 folder, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 114 Mrs. Raymond Mitchell to Advisory Committee, Rural Church and Committee Work, Memphis Conference, 6/27/1963, Historical – West Tennessee-Kentucky 1955-1965 folder, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 115 Rebecca E. Busch to Woman’s Division of Christian Service, Historical--Arkansas-Oklahoma Cooperative Work 1947-1966 folder, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 77 become part of the local community, “becoming so acquainted with the people in the church and communities that the worker can think as they think, and feel as they feel, without sacrificing her ideals; becoming a citizen of that community, a friend to each family there, recognizing their vises [sic] as well as virtues, and loving them regardless.”116 In doing so, they helped build up communities. Cora Lee Glenn, serving in a cooperative parish in Tishomingo County, Mississippi, reported in 1957 that her job was to hand over more and more responsibility to the people themselves. “People are taking more responsibility and realizing the importance of a well-rounded program,” she reported. “They are also becoming more aware of the unchurched people of their communities.” The previous year, Glenn had reported holding a tent revival that brought many new members into the local churches, as well as numerous service projects aimed at young people. Keeping young people interested in the area was of key importance to

Glenn. She noted that many of the young people in the area tended to go away for a time to try out life in the cities, but that many of them eventually returned. The problem was that there were not enough jobs to go around—the factories in Tishomingo County primarily employed women, leaving few jobs for young men. Youth programs and programs aimed at young adults were important, in order to make social life in the area more appealing.117 This often meant taking advantage of the unique opportunities of countryside parishes. One of the popular events held in the church in 1954 was an Easter sunrise service, held at Patrick, Mississippi, where the congregants moved their benches

116 Loraine Heath, annual report, June 6, 1955, North Mississippi Rural Work: Workers 1949-1964 folder, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 117 Cora Lee Glenn, 1957 and 1956 annual reports, North Mississippi Rural Work: Workers 1949-1964 folder, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 78 outside on the hill behind the church, facing east—“the sun rising in the midst of the program made the service a most impressive one.”118

The responsibilities, however, could be significant. Charlotte Seegars, serving in

Franklin County, Virginia, was responsible for twenty-eight churches organized into eight charges. Seegars cooperated with local agencies such as the Boy Scouts, the

Extension Service, and a local junior college, but nevertheless estimated that she was interacting with or affecting in one way or another about 1000 people each month.119 The young people were a particular focus; Seegars reported in 1955 that the young people in her area had been “painfully bashful and had no idea that it could be fun to go to church.”

Her attempts to build up Methodist Youth Fellowship organizations in the area, along with Vacation Church Schools, however, were paying off.120 But there were plenty of attempts to reach adults as well; in 1957 Seegars helped organize lectures on rural life at the local college, as well as study classes aimed at the churchwomen, night classes on leadership, and special services for Lent and Christmas.121

Methodist rural workers were not primarily concerned with the details of agriculture. But they were concerned with healthy rural communities, made up of people who made their livings in a variety of ways. Methodist rural missionaries saw the church as the center of the community. “Certainly, whatever happens in a church and a group of people in a community will have an effect upon the entire area,” Charlotte Seegars

118 Cora Lee Glenn, 1954 annual report, North Mississippi Rural Work: Workers 1949-1964 folder, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 119 Charlotte Seegars, 1955 and 1956 annual reports, Virginia Rural Work: Workers 1950-1963 folder, National Division, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 120 Seegars, 1955 annual report, National Division. 121 Seegars, 1957 annual report, National Division. 79 wrote.122 Protestant agrarians devoted most of their attention to building up agriculture, but they did not ignore the broader contours of life in a rural community.

Rural Home Missions to African Americans

Like pastoral training programs in higher education, home missionaries also operated in a generally segregated world. The Home Missions Council employed both black and white missionaries, but sent black missionaries to work with black churches and white missionaries to work with white churches. However, agrarian ideas crossed racial lines, and at times the segregated missionary world joined together in cooperation.

Vinson Edwards began work as a Religious Extension worker in Georgia in the summer of 1940, under the auspices of the Home Missions Council, the Federal Council of Churches, and the Georgia Cooperating Church Committee—an association of seven black denominations. Like other missionary programs, the religious extension program in

Georgia had the goal of building up rural life and increasing the economic, social, and religious opportunities for rural people. This could involve improving the physical environment—repairing churches, beautifying the grounds, or improving sanitation—and it could also mean working with local agricultural agencies as well as government. But the church was always the central means to those ends; “soul-winning and Christian nurture comprise the primary emphasis of the total program,” according to Edwards. In his first year, serving a six-county area in the center of the state, Edwards noted that there needed to be a greater sense of hope and confidence in the communities he served, especially among the younger generations. The black churches of Georgia would need training programs for the pastors, but they would need lay leadership as well. And

122 ibid. 80 churches needed to reach out to other organizations and institutions in order to integrate church life fully within the community.123

By Edwards’ third year among the black churches of central Georgia, World War

II was having a significant effect upon his efforts. Travel restrictions and food rationing forced him to cut back on scheduled events. The draft was taking away significant numbers of men from rural communities, while others were finding job opportunities in urban defense industries. Nevertheless, Edwards remained committed to the ideals of the religious extension service: to bring rural churches into cooperation with each other, to

“promote the idea of Christian stewardship,” to “build up the Kingdom of God,” and “to keep before rural people the importance and dignity of agriculture as a way of life, the foundation stone of civilization.” Despite the challenges presented by the war, Edwards still managed to hold institutes and conferences for pastors as well as laypeople, and to organize community committees throughout his area of service to concentrate on specific uplift strategies for local churches.124

African American rural missionaries worked among black churches throughout the South. In the summer of 1942, Roosevelt D. Crockett took up a post as a rural missionary in Alabama for the Home Missions Council. Having attended a short course for ministers at Tuskegee Institute, Crockett was excited about serving more directly in a rural community. He carried out surveys of the deep South to ascertain the state of the local black churches, and found that “the church, the center of activity for the southern

123 Vinson A. Edwards, “First Annual Report of the Religious Extension Work in Georgia for the Year Ending June 30, 1941,” folder 2, box 18, Home Missions Council of North America Records, NCC RG 26, PHS. 124 Vinson A. Edwards, “A Report of the Religious Extension Work in Georgia as of September 15, 1943,” folder 2, box 18, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 81 rural Negro, was not assuming its rightful place of leadership” in the community.125

Crockett noted that there was a considerable degree of complacency among black church members in the deep South: “Although almost every adult in the country has his name on the church roll, he does not see the church as the leading institution in many instances.”

Instead, many people seemed to think that public schools and the Extension Service were doing far more good for the community than the church was—despite schools in many places being underfunded, understaffed, and physically dilapidated. Many of the ministers in the places Crockett surveyed were woefully undereducated, with many of them having only achieved a grade-school level. Yet “these untrained men are the men who organized and developed the churches we now have; hence we cannot criticize,” he wrote.126

In addition to overseeing demonstration projects at local churches, Crockett also worked in some of the summer schools and institutes being sponsored by the Home

Missions Council. The Florida Rural Pastors Institute drew 35 ministers from eight denominations. Crockett then attended a school at Tuskegee Institute and a weeklong institute at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg with 90 ministers in attendance. These institutes, although aimed at black ministers, were run by an interracial staff. “A great deal of racial understanding resulted from the contacts made at the institutes,” Crockett reported. He also helped sponsor a women’s institute in

Montgomery, the first of its kind in the area, which was met with considerable interest.

125 Roosevelt D. Crockett, “Annual Report of Religious Extension Work in Alabama, June 1942-June 1943,” folder 24, box 17, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 126 Roosevelt D. Crockett, “A Report on the Rural Church and Farm Life of Negroes in Twenty-Three Counties in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi,” 7-8, folder 24, box 17, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 82

“The women were most eager to learn how to be more effective church and community leaders,” Crockett reported.127

The following year, Crockett continued to help run pastor training courses, offering instruction not only in rural topics such as “The Farm Home” and “Rural

Community Organization,” but also in English grammar, public speaking, and homiletics.

The second annual women’s institute, at the Alabama State Teacher’s College, drew 72 women to courses such as home improvement, religious education, and church and family life. In March 1944, Crockett helped organize the Alabama Interracial Ministerial

Alliance, a conference of 79 pastors, both black and white, held at Tuskegee. The conference passed resolutions on equality in voting laws, allocation of state school funds, wages and job training, and treatment of African Americans by the justice system.128

Rural missionaries, especially in the South, had a broad effect on the communities they served. Although the church was the center of their work, their holistic view of rural life, and their commitment to the Christian gospel, also led them to critique unjust social arrangements. Although many of the programs developed by organizations like the Home

Missions Council were segregated almost by default, there were times when people worked across racial lines. Rural missionaries therefore contributed to a growing civil rights consciousness in the South.

127 Roosevelt D. Crockett, “Annual Report of Religious Extension Work in Alabama, June 1942-June 1943,” folder 24, box 17, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 128 Roosevelt Crockett, “Annual Report of Religious Extension Work in Alabama, July 1943-June 1944,” folder 24, box 17, Home Missions Council of North America Records. 83

Conclusion

Rural church reform in the United States began on rather rocky footing. Although there was great interest among Progressive reformers in the potential of the church, few reformers made any substantive impact upon churchgoers and congregations. Mainline denominations began experimenting with progressive reforms, but it was not until denominations started working ecumenically, and focusing on the development of a missionary consciousness, that there was a true energy for rural reform. By partnering with each other, and especially with secular institutions like universities, Protestant denominations began to expand their ability to reach rural churches. Although many of the collaborations involved teaching pastors and missionaries about the science of agriculture, the general intention was to instill agrarian values in the religious workers. A greater sympathy for what agriculture demanded and for what it could supply would help churches relate to rural people. With more knowledge about agriculture, they could preach a more agrarian gospel.

Chapter 2 Spiritual Efficiency: Rethinking the Rural Church Experience, 1925-1970

Praise ye the Lord; Sing unto the Lord a new song, and his praise in the congregation of saints. - Psalm 149:1 (KJV)

The previous chapter traced the growing realization among rural reformers that they needed to work as close to the ground as possible, among religious workers, developing the idea of the agricultural and rural missionary. Reformers did not, however, immediately abandon broad visions of reshaping the experience of being a member of and worshipping in a rural church. Protestant agrarians continued to champion changes they believed would be beneficial for communities as a whole.

Drawing on their Progressive inheritance, reformers tried to promote parish consolidation in the service of efficiency, attempting to create structures that would serve larger regions with fewer expenditures. They also promoted religious changes such as new rural-themed services, prayers, and hymns. These changes remained controversial in the very communities they were designed to benefit. Yet from the 1930s onward, the solutions championed by missions organizations became gradually more successful.

Cooperation remained the watchword. Reforms were more successful when they embraced cooperation—both with multiple denominations and with secular organizations. Building upon the experience of working alongside state universities, rural church reformers came increasingly to rely upon agricultural organizations like 4-H to help promote their ideas. Rethinking the rural church experience was a step toward 85

Protestant ecumenism, and helped suggest to members of mainline churches that there was more reason to come together than there was to stay apart.

Parish Consolidation and the Larger Parish

One of the most prominent trends of the Progressive Era was reformers’ dedication to “efficiency”—the desire to strip out waste and redundancy in all aspects of society. Efficiency became particularly valued in the workplace, leading to Taylorism and the application of scientific management to manufacturing. Efficiency in production valued an extremely strict division of labor, in which workers were matched to increasingly specific (and increasingly deskilled) tasks in order to increase output. But reformers also applied the idea of efficiency to other aspects of society, including the burgeoning conservation movement—where the environment was seen as a collection of

“natural resources” to be scientifically managed and used for maximum utility.1

Efficiency might mean consolidating small schools into large centralized locations. It might mean industrialization on farms rather than relying on animal power or human muscle.2

Rural church reformers believed in efficiency as well. A 1932 study of church planning argued that small churches were outdated and backward. Churches, according to

Arthur Van Saun, had responsibility for three main objectives: “Eliminating the inefficient; centralizing and unifying; and projecting the accumulated life.” Churches

1 Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency. 2 Barron, Mixed Harvest; Neth, Preserving the Family Farm. 86

“must centralize, centralize the people, centralize the talent, and centralize the program,” he wrote.3

Many rural places dealt with two related problems: overchurching and underchurching. There were often too many churches in any given rural area, left over from years when rural communities had been prospering. At the same time, those oversaturated areas were often unable to offer much in the way of a dynamic church program, since each church might have a tiny actual membership.

Just as many secular reformers proposed school consolidation, rural church reformers envisioned consolidating churches in order to be more effective. If churches in a particular area could be joined together in some fashion, sharing resources, ministry, and congregants, then perhaps they could more effectively focus the spiritual energy of rural communities.

This often meant working across denominational lines. Church consolidation was often a strongly ecumenical undertaking. Its focus on unity helped the mainline denominations see themselves as brethren, and contributed to the very idea of “the mainline.” But, as Mark Rich put it, “The purpose of church cooperation is not to change the denominational convictions and loyalties of any church or person. The aim is to bring churches into a working relationship for a more vigorous and effective ministry.”4

Consolidated churches could be ecumenical and at the same time retain denominational identity.

There were a number of typical church consolidation strategies, but the most visible and most discussed was the “larger parish.” The larger parish idea was developed

3 Van Saun, “Replanning the Rural Church,” 106, 110. 4 Mark Rich, “Local Interchurch Cooperation: A Handbook” (Missouri Council of Churches, n.d.), 4, box 15, folder 8, NCC Division of Home Missions Records, 1950-1964, NCC RG 7, PHS. 87 throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Rather than closing small rural churches and sending everyone to one centralized church (in the way that central schools operated), the larger parish plan sought to keep outlying churches open. It would do so by binding them together administratively within a specific geographic area, and operating them collectively through shared staff members and a joint parish council. The larger parish idea was therefore based around the existing community. Instead of reshaping the community, it tried to make it work more effectively.5

Critically, as Mark Rich and Ralph Williamson would write in 1943, the larger parish plan could not be successfully instituted “until there is a strong demand for it. It is certain that they should not be established against the wishes of the lay leaders in the churches.”6 Promoters like Rich and Williamson learned the lessons of the early denominational efforts to reform churches, which generally failed because they did not take into account the needs and desires of local communities. Only when they emerged from actual needs could Progressive-style reforms succeed.

The parish overseen by Rev. Harlow S. Mills, in Benzonia, Michigan, was generally regarded by observers of the movement as the first parish to bear the name and characteristics of the larger parish.7 Mills’s parish comprised 2500 people, both

Methodist and Congregational, and in 1910 he hired two assistants to help him with the administration and the travel that overseeing the parish required. “From week to week I could see the kindling flame of enthusiasm in the congregation,” Mills reported. “I

5 Rich, “Larger Parish,” 4-6. 6 Mark Rich and Ralph L. Williamson, “Principles and Procedure in Organizing Larger Parishes, Federated & Union Churches,” Rural Institute for Religious Workers Mimeograph Series 9, 1943, emphasis in original; Rural Institute folder, box 3, Hugh Anderson Moran papers, #39-2-972, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 7 John Evans, “Larger Parish Plan Solution to Church Ills,” Chicago Daily Tribune, Aug. 10, 1930, F4; Kier, “A Study of Federated Churches,” 11; Shepherd, “The Larger Parish,” 8; Dana, “The Larger Parish Plan,” 6; Mills, Making of a Country Parish. 88 believe that the rank and file of our churches are more ready to march forth to larger service than most of us have thought.”8

But as the idea caught on around the country, proponents were quick to emphasize that the larger parish was not a specific set of required characteristics, but rather a flexible definition that came in infinite shades of variation. “There is no exclusive LARGER

PARISH PLAN,” wrote James McLeod Carr, PCUS Secretary of Town and Country

Church. “Each parish is free to develop its own plan of cooperation.”9 The flexibility in the plan made it adaptable to the individual circumstances of each group of churches.

Early observers of the phenomenon easily saw the minister responsible for a larger parish as a latter-day circuit rider. Where nineteenth-century Methodist ministers had once traversed wide areas spreading evangelicalism, the larger parish minister lived nearly as itinerant a lifestyle. “The horse is no longer his constant companion and aid in travel, however, for today he covers far more territory in far less time in his faithful

Ford,” wrote one theological student.10 Larger parishes could sometimes encompass very substantial areas, and coordinating services and activities across the miles required constant travel.

But larger parishes were designed to provide more than just worship services, and the minister who took charge of such parishes needed to be more than simply a preacher.

He had to be an administrator as well as an active member of the community. “A pastor must understand, must know things, must be able to put himself into the life of the community,” said one larger parish member. “The minister has to be one of the people.

8 Mills, Making of a Country Parish, 43. 9 Carr, Working Together in the Larger Parish, 6, 9. Emphasis in original. 10 Heath, “The Larger Parish Plan,” 3. See also Chatterton, “Ideology of the Larger Parish,” 6. 89

He is much more likely to be fitted for country work if he has an agricultural background.”11

Though cooperation across denominations could be challenging to congregants, most proponents of the plan did not think they were challenging the gospel in any way.

Mark Rich emphasized that there was nothing theologically new about the larger parish’s emphasis upon unity—“the fundamental teachings of Jesus are not altered” in the plan.

“This is one of the precepts which Jesus and his followers repeated time after time,” Rich wrote. “It is found in Jesus’ simile of the tree. ‘I am the vine ye are the branches’….Interpreted in terms of the community, this teaching means that the inhabitants are potentially one family,—one human family and all children of God.” The larger parish was a way to realize the spiritual message of Christian unity, but it was only new from an organizational standpoint. Working together in service of the ecumenical ideal would be challenging but rewarding. “But, the larger parish does not demand conformity,” emphasized Rich. “The individual who is subjected to the ideas and points of view of those who differ will be broadened and made more appreciative of larger spiritual truths.”12 This potential led to a great deal of optimism about the plan’s future.

One supporter called it “a real source of hope for a restored, rehabilitated, rural church.”13

Larger Parishes in Practice

At least in part because of the flexibility that the plan offered, the larger parish idea caught on around the country. Ralph Felton’s 1941 study of 35 larger parishes throughout fifteen states showed that a majority of the parishes were started for

11 Anonymous quoted in Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 130. 12 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 516-18. 13 Frank R. Mease, “The Larger Parish Plan,” Town & Country Church 72 (Sept., 1951), 2. 90 evangelistic purposes. 57 percent of the parishes were started “to reach the unchurched”;

54 percent “to reach a missionary area,” and 51 percent “to serve the youth better” (some churches, of course, gave multiple reasons). Only 8 percent of the churches listed “to save money” as a reason to start a larger parish.14

Some larger parish projects followed in the footsteps of typical efficiency strategies like school consolidation. In the early 1930s, the region around Van

Hornesville, New York, a village in Herkimer County, had combined twenty-two individual one-room schoolhouses into one centralized school. Van Hornesville then applied the same principle to its churches, creating a single parish of approximately 175 square miles. The resulting Otsquago Valley Larger Parish, founded in 1936, brought together Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, and Universalist churches.15

Margaret Harris, the director of religious education for the new larger parish, emphasized the eschatological nature of Christianity as it applied to the larger parish—as well as its inherently communal nature. “It functions toward the building of God’s

Kingdom on earth—a program so large that it requires the humble cooperation of every consecrated person and one which goes forward under God’s leadership in such a way that the results can never be claimed by any individual or group.”16 The larger parish was not simply about making church programs more efficient and practical, but about combining all people into the Kingdom of God.

There were multiple ways to bring people together. Among other activities, the

Otsquago Valley parish emphasized the need for religious education in the public schools. By 1937 the Van Hornesville Central School, with assistance from the larger

14 Felton, Art of Church Cooperation, 33. 15 Harris, Life in the Larger Parish, 17-20. 16 Harris, Life in the Larger Parish, 30. 91 parish, began giving classes in Bible Literature. Although the intent was certainly catechetical, Harris noted the way in which Van Hornesville teachers used the King

James Bible alongside the American Revised Version as well as the Catholic Douay

Bible, “with interest in the changes of wording. A quiet understanding of another’s preference, made for religious tolerance.”17 Van Hornesville, like many larger parishes, encouraged cooperation across denominational lines. Harris was proud of the fact that

“we have had no objection raised by any tax payer, parent, minister, priest, or regent” to the Bible education in the public schools. “On the contrary,” she noted, “there has been encouraging support to the program on the grounds that it was fair, non-sectarian, and provided a part of the heritage which belonged to every child regardless of age, nationality or Ecclesiastical preference.”18

Tompkins County

One of the best documented regions in which larger parishes were used is

Tompkins County, New York. With Cornell University already a leader in rural church planning and education in the 1920s, the villages around Ithaca were prime locations for experimentation with strategies like the larger parish. Although the Tompkins County larger parishes were not as tightly organized as many other larger parishes around the country, it was also the case that “in few places in America have so many experiments in rural church cooperation been centered in one county.”19

Enfield Falls Larger Parish, located in the rural western part of the county, became one of the most visible and successful larger parishes in the country. Founded in

17 Harris, Life in the Larger Parish, 53. 18 Harris, Life in the Larger Parish, 57. 19 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 11. 92

1927, the parish covered 200 square miles and encompassed fourteen different churches.

Most of the parish was good farming land, interspersed with villages like Mecklenburg and Newfield, along with smaller communities—some little more than a handful of houses, like Cayutaville and Enfield Center itself. Where the area had once also been home to numerous mills and small industries like blacksmithies, by 1930 the area of the parish had lost almost all of its occupations and industries. In addition, its churches had been declining in size from their late nineteenth century height, even more rapidly than the overall population declined—and at least four churches in the larger parish area had closed entirely by the time the larger parish was created.20

Despite the fading churches, local traditions held strong. Bristol Chatterton, a student at Union Theological Seminary who studied the Tompkins County churches in

1932, realized that many people were strongly attached to their local churches. At

Kennedys Corners, there was a small Methodist church. The tiny community on Route 79 was just four miles west of Ithaca. To Chatterton, “Nearly every argument, whether from convenience, common sense, or finance, would point out that there should be no church where people have such easy access to a city. But the ancestral loyalty and church fellowship of these people is too strong to be overcome easily by the plans of higher powers.”21 The solution was to join small but loyal churches together into a larger parish.

It was the Board of Home Missions of the Methodist Church that first identified the need for a larger parish in the Enfield area. The church called a meeting in July of

1927 during the Cornell summer course for town and country ministers, and decided to

20 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 31-62; Susan Thompson, “Town of Enfield,” in The Towns of Tompkins County: From Podunk to the Magnetic Springs, edited by Jane Marsh Dieckmann (Ithaca: DeWitt Historical Society of Tompkins County, 1998), 107-112, 123. 21 Chatterton, “Ideology of the Larger Parish,” 21. 93 form a larger parish. Under the direction of Ralph Felton, then rural church professor at

Cornell, seven of the local Methodist churches held a meeting in August to formally organize the parish. They invited the Enfield and Newfield Baptist churches as well as the Mecklenburg Presbyterian church to join the parish, and the Enfield Falls Larger

Parish was born.22

From the start, Enfield Falls Larger Parish was a challenging parish to bring together. The churches in the larger parish covered a wide geographical area that stretched across a county line. Enfield itself and the communities near it were tied economically to Ithaca, but the western part of the parish included Schuyler County communities like Odessa and Cayutaville whose urban center was Watkins Glen. Mark

Rich noted that “while every place in the area is accessible from every other place, there is no natural avenue of communication which binds the area into a unit.”23 Although the

Enfield and Newfield Methodist churches dominated the parish, the overall grouping still attracted strong participation, including hundreds of children.24

The larger parish was overseen by a handful of professional staff, including six ministers and two religious educators, as well as a council. The larger parish council was made up of the professional staff along with lay representatives from each participating church. Although the parish council planned activities and charted the overall direction for the parish, individual churches were always free to act independently if they did not agree with the plans of the council.25

22 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 75-76. 23 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 40. 24 Chatterton, “Ideology of the Larger Parish,” 48; Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 79. 25 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 81-82. 94

The educational aspect was one of the primary considerations behind the parish, as many of the children in the more distant parts of the parish had no interaction with the church or with existing Sunday schools. “The only way to reach them was for the church to go to them in the person of a teacher.”26 The parish provided day school religious education, as well as Sunday schools and vacation religious education.

Enfield Falls Larger Parish quickly embarked on an energetic program of parish activities, from social gatherings like picnics and movies to educational opportunities like classes and lectures, and religious gatherings like revivals and prayer services. Many of these involved individual churches, not the entire parish, such as the Newfield Methodist

Church’s men’s supper in February 1928, whose menu “is to be such that it will make the women proud of their husbands.”27 That same winter, Enfield and Kennedys Corner held a reading contest to see who could attend church most reliably and read the most literature about church stewardship.28

One of the most successful projects of the parish was an outdoor Vespers service held most weeks during July and August, on Sunday afternoons at Enfield Falls State

Park (now Robert H. Treman State Park). The park provided benches, a platform, and parking for the church members. Once gathered at the park, parish members could enjoy musical performances, either by the larger parish choir or by guest musicians, as well as guest speakers, including such prominent figures as Warren Wilson or Methodist bishop

26 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 136. 27 “Great Plans for Men’s Supper Program Feb. 28,” Messenger of the Enfield Falls Larger Parish 1:3 (Feb. 11, 1928), 3. 28 “Stewardship Reading Contest at Enfield and Kennedys,” Messenger of the Enfield Falls Larger Parish 1:1 (Jan. 21, 1928), 3; “Enfield and Kennedys,” Messenger of the Enfield Falls Larger Parish 1:3 (Feb. 11, 1928), 3. 95

Edwin Hughes. The very first vespers service, on July 15, 1928, featured an address by

Mark Dawber, and was attended by seven hundred people.29

Although, according to Mark Rich, some people evidently complained that the afternoon services made it less likely for people to also attend morning services in their own churches, the popularity of the vespers services was quite obvious. “A number of the families in the larger parish area who would never think of darkening the doors of the churches would attend the afternoon vesper services and become enthusiastic about them.” Having a service in the park was particularly attractive to people with children, who found “an excellent occasion for a family picnic in the park and friendly visitation with old friends and newly-formed acquaintances.”30

After the first service, the parish newspaper lauded the beautiful surroundings,

“the background of stately pine trees, the wooded hills rising abruptly on all sides, the distant murmur of the falls,” and predicted that “this series of Sunday afternoon meetings will become the outstanding religious feature of this part of the state.”31 Indeed, the outdoor services were so popular that they tended to attract between 500 and 2000 people.32 Beginning in 1931, the larger parish began to hold Easter morning sunrise services outside as well, at Taughannock Falls State Park on Cayuga Lake.33

Mark Rich noted that “the larger parish…was to the churches what a plank is to a drowning man, except that the parish was not grasped at with the intensity of purpose that

29 “Large Crowds Attend Vesper Services at Enfield Falls Each Sunday Afternoon,” Messenger of the Enfield Falls Larger Parish 1:26 (July 19, 1928), 1. 30 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 89. 31 “Large Crowds Attend Vesper Services at Enfield Falls Each Sunday Afternoon,” Messenger of the Enfield Falls Larger Parish 1:26 (July 19, 1928), 1. 32 Chatterton, “Ideology of the Larger Parish,” 24; Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 88. 33 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 106. 96 drives the sinking swimmer to his plank.”34 Still, Rich found that there was considerable positive feeling toward the larger parish. Although not all communities fully understood the idea of the parish, and did not participate equally, both the leadership and the membership were grateful for the parish and wanted it to continue.

The leaders of the parish valued the larger parish primarily as a religious organization, one in keeping with “that greatest of prayers” (as the editor of the parish newspaper put it), when Jesus “five times laid one plea before God…THAT THEY ALL MAY

BE ONE…THAT THE WORLD MAY BELIEVE.” Bringing together multiple denominations in a single parish was a way to work for the unity that Jesus preached. Although the Enfield

Falls parish was dominated by Methodists, the editor acknowledged, “does that mean that we are trying to make all the churches…conform to the creed, forms, and customs, of some one denomination?....Most assuredly not.” All were welcome in the larger parish, according to the editor, in order to further the cause of Christian unity.35

To the membership, however, the ecumenical religious ideal seems to have been of much lesser importance. Judging by Mark Rich’s interviews, the social life of the larger parish was the biggest draw. “Some were impressed,” Rich wrote, “with the discovery that after living in a community for many years, the larger parish introduced them to families within three or four miles that they had never known before.”36 Children in the parish reported being particularly taken with its ability to offer them “a wider field of friendships.”37

34 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 59. 35 “Editorial,” Messenger of the Enfield Falls Larger Parish 1:2 (Feb. 4, 1928), 2. 36 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 128. 37 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 142. 97

Enfield Falls was not the only larger parish in Tompkins County. In the southern part of the county, the B.F. Tobey Larger Parish was founded in 1929, when four churches in Caroline (three Methodist and one Congregational) and five churches in

Danby (Congregational, Methodist, and Baptist) began to coordinate services.38 The land in both Caroline and Danby (the towns to the south and southeast of Ithaca) is hillier and considerably poorer than in other parts of the county, making the towns comparatively unsuited for agriculture. By the end of the 1920s, much of the land formerly under cultivation had been abandoned. Small farms continued to produce corn and other grains, and dairy and poultry farming was common, but the towns were far less prosperous than other parts of the county. Like the western part of the county, Danby and Caroline had once had numerous small industries, including mills and dairy factories, but they had all vanished by the end of the nineteenth century. As the local economic situation collapsed, so did the population, and with it participation in local churches. Between 1890 and 1930, church attendance in the Tobey parish area had declined by over 50 percent.39

Inspired by the Enfield Falls parish, the formation of the Tobey parish was also catalyzed by Ralph Felton, Mark Dawber, and other religious professionals in the orbit of

Cornell. The parish hired a pastor newly graduated from the Boston University School of

Theology as its chairman, and a religious educator from Northwestern University.

The Tobey parish put a strong emphasis on religious education. When Viola

Schuldt was hired as director of education (having previously worked in the Enfield Falls

38 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 183-187. The list of cooperating churches is slightly different in Barbara M. Kone et al., “A History of the Town of Caroline, Tompkins County, New York, United States of America,” 45, http://carolinehistorian.org/history.htm (accessed January 23, 2013). 39 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 167-69, 172, 177; Molly Adams, “Town of Caroline,” in The Towns of Tompkins County: From Podunk to the Magnetic Springs, edited by Jane Marsh Dieckmann (Ithaca: DeWitt Historical Society of Tompkins County, 1998), 59-60; Linda McCandless, “Town of Danby,” in ibid., 77-83. The Resettlement Administration purchased large areas of worn-out land in Danby under the New Deal, land which is now Danby State Forest. 98 parish), there were only two organizations within the parish for young people, a branch of the Christian Endeavor Society (a national nondenominational organization) and something called the Christian Whoopee Club. Schuldt organized youth conferences at which young people had a high degree of leadership, pageants, and even got the youth writing and producing their own parish newspaper.40 Almost 300 children participated in weekly religious education classes, and summer Vacation Bible Schools attracted almost as many children. Farmers from the parish lent their cars for children to be driven to the vacation schools.41

The Tobey parish put a particular emphasis on the outdoors. Members of the parish cooperated to build a 20 foot by 30 foot log cabin in the woods near Slaterville. It included a 8x12 kitchen with a stone fireplace. The cabin cost about $125 to build, but the parish benefited from a lot of volunteer labor and supplies, including 200 chestnut tree logs donated by one farmer from the parish. The parish used the cabin for meetings, picnics, and fellowship activities. In the summer, the parish sponsored camps along

Cayuga Lake for the youth of the churches. Each child attending a summer camp was asked to bring along a food contribution for the whole group, either vegetables, meat, or dairy. The campers would prepare the food together. In addition, like the Enfield parish, the Tobey parish held Eastern sunrise services in order to get parish members to enjoy and experience the outdoors.42

Seminaries that were training the next generation of ministers wanted to learn about the larger parish experiment. In November 1933, twenty-seven students from New

40 Chatterton, “Ideology of the Larger Parish,” 46. 41 Ralph Felton, “Reconstructing the Church in a Rural Agriculture,” Felton Papers 1956 folder, box 1, Ralph Felton Papers, DUA. 42 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 205-206, 211. 99

England seminaries visited Ithaca on a trip organized by the Interseminary Commission for Training for the Rural Ministry. Over the course of a weekend they visited Enfield

Falls Larger Parish and Tobey Larger Parish, and attended seminars held by pastors, professors from Cornell, and members of the parishes. On Sunday morning the students and their professors were guests in fifteen different churches around Ithaca; at one of the churches in Danby, Malcolm Dana gave the sermon, while two Yale Divinity School students helped perform music, preach to the children, and run Sunday school classes for adults and young adults. Later in the day, Liberty Hyde Bailey ran a seminar with the students at the Tobey Larger Parish Cabin to discuss the changing rural pastorate.43

Despite the apparent enthusiasm for larger parishes, and the wide variety of programs that larger parishes like those in Tompkins County promoted, not everyone approved of the consolidation plan. Some criticized it for costing too much, because salaries had to be paid not only to the ministers but also to the teachers and other workers.

Some complained that the larger parish deconstructed the community, rather than bringing a larger community together. Mark Rich found that “although Enfield residents realize that the parish centered in their township there was some feeling that the leaders were away too much, and that the program too frequently called parishioners to other parts of the larger parish.” Others complained that the parish idea was forced upon them without consultation. Like other ideas of agrarian reformers, when reforms came down from above, they were likely to be met with greater resistance from the laity.44

43 Keeter, “Interseminary Commission,” 153-55. The Danby church visited was probably the Danby Congregational Church (now the Danby Federated Church), which was much bigger than the two Danby Methodist churches that also participated in the larger parish; Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 185-86. 44 Rich, “Larger Parishes,” 146-150, quote at 147. 100

Other Strategies for Church Cooperation

The larger parish was not the only method proposed for getting churches to cooperate and consolidate. A federated church was a combination of at least two churches of different denominations “meeting as one congregation and maintaining one united program of worship, evangelism, education and service,” without giving up their separate denominational ties.45 Ashburnham Community Church (Federated) in Ashburnham,

Massachusetts, for instance, was formed in 1954, and was affiliated with the Methodist

Church and the Congregational Christian Churches. Congregants could declare their membership in either denomination or neither.46

Churches of different denominations could also remain separate and meet separately, but share a minister in common, creating a “yoked field.” There would be no other cooperation between the congregations. “The pastor is the big expense of a church,” reported Philip Steinmetz, a yoked field member, in 1955. “If the burden of his support can be shared, it is a great help to the church.” Yoking churches together through a minister would also help create “a more united front against a strong Roman Catholic or

Mormon or Pentacostal [sic] element in the town,” Steinmetz argued. His field, a small town in Massachusetts, was comprised of an Episcopal and a Congregational church, neither of which could afford to keep its own minister. Even though the churches were dramatically different—“unmixable”—occupying different ends of the high church-low church spectrum, Steinmetz reported a certain allegiance to both. “There is something about working like this which has the ‘feel’ of rightness about it and which makes the

45 Felton, Art of Church Cooperation, 44. 46 Joseph R. Newton, “United Protestant Church,” in National Convocation on the Church in Town and Country, “The Christian Mission in the Rural-Social Process,” 62-64. 101 task of being confined to the limits of one denomination rather horrifying. Having had a taste of this situation,” Steinmetz confessed, “I am ruined for the more usual parish.”47

Some pastors remained optimistic about the prospects for federation and cooperation. When asked what advice he would give seminary students thinking about serving in a church like this, Leslie J. Tuck, formerly the pastor of Avon Federated

Church in Avon, Illinois, suggested that students “forget there are denominations, and build for the Kingdom on earth, with the ideal of the one body of Christ.” The theological benefits of blurring denominational lines were strong enough, he claimed, to overcome the practical challenges of running such a church.48

It was a sentiment shared by a certain number of pastors in cooperative churches.

John Andreé of Florin Community Church in Florin, California, stridently praised his church, saying, “By the Grace of God we preach Christ and him crucified and there by serve all. Doing the work and follow[ing] our Lord and Master.” The theological and spiritual message, the creation of the Kingdom, was the important thing to Andreé, and practical challenges ought not to get in the way of the pastor’s dedication. When asked if there were any unfavorable aspects of running a community church, Andreé responded

49 confidently, “LIVE CHRIST AND THEN THERE WILL BE NONE.”

The prospect of federating churches of multiple denominations did not, however, appeal to everyone. Across denominational lines there might be conflicting theological traditions or church customs that would make the pastorate very difficult. Paul E. Nelson, a pastor in an upstate New York federated church, wrote in a survey that he could not

47 Philip H. Steinmetz, “The Interdenominational Yoked Field,” in National Convocation on the Church in Town and Country, “The Christian Mission in the Rural-Social Process,” 57-59. 48 Leslie J. Tuck questionnaire, in collection Returned Questionnaires by states – Arkansas-Iowa, box 3, Ralph Felton Papers, DUA. 49 John Andreé questionnaire, in collection Community Church III, box 3, Ralph Felton Papers, DUA. 102 recommend a union church to a young seminarian. Rather, “I think it would be much better for a man to take such a field only after some years of experience in managing a church of one denomination.”50 Methodist minister George Frederick Wells wrote in a private note to himself of the “popular demand sweeping New England, New York, and other open country and village sections of America, for so-called local federated churches. There are now hundreds of such federations of two or three congregations all in the same village under a single pastoral leadership. Is this the coming of the kingdom, or is it a disease?”51

Hinting at perhaps some severe problems, S.E. Wright of Exira Federated Church,

Exira, Kansas, responded to a survey by saying that he had “some ideas on this subject,” but that “if you should follow them it might cause you a lot of trouble and unless you are a very exceptional person [they] would do but little good. So [I] will refrain from stating them.”52 But perhaps the most telling advice came from Rev. Allen B. Rice II of West

Lebanon Federated Church in West Lebanon, Indiana. His recommendation for young seminarians preparing for a federated church was simple: “Be prepared to liberalize your views.”53

The Spirituality of the Rural Church

As reformers attempted to cultivate efficiency in how rural churches were organized, they often simultaneously imagined new ways of worshipping. Worship was

50 Paul E. Nelson questionnaire, in collection Returned Questionnaires by states – Arkansas-Iowa, box 3, Ralph Felton Papers, DUA. 51 George Frederick Wells notes, Dates folder, box 9, George Frederick Wells papers, #2141, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 52 S.E. Wright questionnaire, in collection Returned Questionnaires By States – Kansas-Montana, box 3, Ralph Felton Papers, DUA. 53 Allen B. Rice II questionnaire, in collection Returned Questionnaires by states – Arkansas-Iowa, box 3, Ralph Felton Papers, DUA. 103 extremely important to Protestant agrarians; regardless of changes in parish structure, they believed that a vital and active life of worship would help cement rural church communities together.

Some reformers viewed agriculture as an obvious setting for Christian worship.

Edward Ziegler noted that “there is something almost sacramental about country life. All the processes of agricultural life are inextricably tied up with religion.” To Ziegler, “a non-worshipping farmer is a strange being indeed. No one else in our whole system of life is closer to the workings of God, more a partner in His creative processes.”54 To

Ziegler, the inherent religiosity of agriculture was the basis for creating a new emphasis on worship in the country church.

In order to revitalize worship, rural reformers like Ziegler emphasized what they saw as its essential characteristics, aspects that might get lost in communities that were struggling with instability. Worship, Ziegler argued, “celebrates life” and everything good about life. It also is “communion with God,” where worshippers “find ourselves in the presence of the majesty and splendor and holiness of the Eternal.” It also lays the foundation for “abundant living”—one of the favored phrases of Protestant agrarians

(taken from John 10:10). “We go out from the place of worship,” wrote Ziegler, “with power to live life to the full, with power to be victorious over temptation, with vision and dynamic to change the aspects of life which are bad or sub-Christian, to create together with God a finer world in which men may live.”55

To emphasize these aspects of worship, American reformers developed new holidays that were intended to form major pivots of the rural church year. Two of the

54 Ziegler, Country Altars, 5. 55 Ziegler, Country Altars, 11-12. 104 most significant new worship services proposed by reformers were Rural Life Sunday and Harvest Home Sunday. Both drew upon a deeply agrarian view of the created world, one that saw humans as an organic part of a world ecosystem.

Rural Life Sunday

Rural Life Sunday had been proposed in 1929 by the International Association of

Agricultural Missions. It was supported by the Federal Council of Churches and the

Home Missions Council. It was placed on the fifth Sunday after Easter, during a period that had traditionally been part of the Rogation Days on the Catholic calendar—days set aside for seeking blessings for the planting season. Because of its placement in relation to the Catholic liturgical calendar, Protestant agrarians encouraged the National Catholic

Rural Life Conference to join with them and embrace Rural Life Sunday. The NCRLC enthusiastically endorsed the idea, but it remained a Protestant creation.56

Leigh Schmidt notes that “Rural Life Sunday appealed particularly in the 1930s in the face of agricultural depression, the Dust Bowl, and soil depletion.” For decades Rural

Life Sunday was celebrated in churches across the country, becoming what Schmidt calls

“a sabbath of solidarity for farming communities and for all Christians concerned about the conditions of rural life.”57 Schmidt argues that Rural Life Sunday (as well as celebrations like Arbor Day) served as preparation for the environmental celebrations of the 1970s, including Earth Day itself (which gave churches another opportunity to discuss environmental protection).

56 Woods, Cultivating Soil and Soul, 20. 57 Schmidt, “From Arbor Day to the Environmental Sabbath,” 312. 105

Yet Rural Life Sunday was more than just a “prophetic precursor” to contemporary Christian environmentalism.58 It was an intrinsic part of the agricultural missionary project. Although the holiday did promote conservationist and environmental themes in an agricultural context, its broader goal was to try to sacralize and liturgize the full experience of community life in the country. Rural Life Sunday embraced not only the environment but also work, family, and Christian identity.

Rural Life Sunday received swift approval from national leaders. In April 1929, shortly after the International Association of Agricultural Missions proposed the observance, President Hoover wrote to the Home Missions Council that “the blessing of heaven to be invoked on May 5th by Christian Churches, of all creeds and in all lands, upon the farmer and his work, will comfort many with the knowledge that their burdens are in the anxious sympathetic thoughts of men of good will everywhere.” Secretary of

Agriculture Arthur Hyde stated that he “cannot help thinking that the action of this religious Council in bringing about so large a measure of religious concurrence in connection with agriculture and rural life foreshadows a better general understanding of the farmers’ problems and their acceptance as the problems of the nation as a whole.”59

The Ideas of Rural Life Sunday

One of the key insights that Rural Life Sunday promoted was the immanent presence of God, and especially in nature. Mark Rich’s Rural Life Prayers booklet included numerous prayers for Rural Life Sunday that revolved around this perspective.

“The winds are in Thy hand,” read one prayer reprinted from a 1929 Free Church Book

58 Schmidt, “From Arbor Day to the Environmental Sabbath,” 323. 59 Both quoted in Home Missions Council, “Rural Life Sunday May 10, 1931,” box 17, folder 13, Home Missions Council of North America Records, NCC RG 26, PHS. 106 of Common Prayer; “bridle them and bind them, that they may not come forth to destroy the labours of the ploughman, nor to defeat the husbandman of his hopes.” Another prayer, written by Hilda L. Ives, began, “Our Father in Heaven, Lord of Field and Forest,

Hill and Stream, we thank Thee for the manifestation of Thy power in all growing things.

Fruitful soil, quickening sunlight, favorable rains are Thy good gifts to us.”60 A suggested program published by the Home Missions Council in 1931 included the following prayer:

“Open our eyes and let us see the hidden wonders and secret beauty of this beautiful earth and enable us to recognize in nature, friends and all that is good, Thy presence here on earth.” The same program included Joseph Mary Plunkett’s poem, “I See His Blood

Upon the Rose,” which included the stanza, “I see His face in every flower; / The thunder and the surging birds / Are but his voice—and carven by His power / Rocks are His written words.”61 The conclusion was clear: nature reflected the intention and presence of

God.

At the same time, Rural Life Sunday called attention to the individuals working on God’s earth and the labor that those people performed. Prayers and songs published for the holiday again demonstrate this: Mark Rich’s booklet includes a prayer by Philip

Pitcher that began, “Gracious God, whose Son our Lord made tools for farmers, grant

Thy blessing upon the implements with which we work. May they be no longer symbols of drudgery but of the blessed privileges that are ours.”62 Hymns of the Rural Spirit, a book published by the FCC in 1947 and regularly advertised to rural churches around the country as a Rural Life Sunday resource, included numerous hymns about work and the

60 Rich, Rural Life Prayers, 8-9. 61 Home Missions Council, “Rural Life Sunday May 10, 1931,” box 17, folder 13, Home Missions Council of North America Records, NCC RG 26, PHS. 62 Rich, Rural Life Prayers, 14. 107 joy of farm labor. These hymns tended to overly romanticize the allure of manual labor, but nevertheless served as reminders of the holy nature of the task. “Here on my native soil I live and labor,” began one hymn; “here, close to God and nature’s wondrous ways;

/ Glad in my heart for land and home and neighbor—glad for the useful tasks that fill my days.” Another contained the verses, “We are stewards, and what we are worth / We shall prove as we plow the good earth, / And are sowing, where for others the grain will be growing. / There is stony and thorn-covered soil, / there is heart-breaking, back-breaking toil; / fellow-workers, let us never be counted as shirkers!”63

Rural Life Sunday was therefore a deeply agrarian holiday, in the fullest sense of the word. It was built around the idea that the land, and how people treat the land, is the foundation for proper living and proper society. Because of God’s presence in the earth— having created it and called it good—Protestant agrarians felt they had a distinct responsibility to continue the work of creation.

To Protestant agrarians, all parts of life were ultimately connected to the relationship between people and the land. In a speech written during World War II, for instance, John Reisner, executive secretary of Agricultural Missions, Inc., saw Rural Life

Sunday as an opportunity to acknowledge “how fundamentally our vaunted industrial and commercial civilization is related to the land and to the food which comes out of it.” He saw the war exacerbating the problem of hunger, and the need for wealth in the form of food to be shared around the world. But more importantly, he saw Rural Life Sunday as a reminder of the generative power of creation. “To me the great significance of creation is not the wide variety of created things—but that God gave to each created thing the power to recreate itself.”

63 Hymns of the Rural Spirit, 43, 116. 108

Although agriculture especially had a responsibility to work in harmony with the generative power of the earth, it was not purely for its own sake. Reisner acknowledged

(in typical agrarian fashion) that the health of the land was central to the existence of the family. In cities, family life was typically destabilized, but there were equal dangers when farmers adopted industrialized agriculture instead of small family farms. Without a

“sense of vocation,” Reisner argued, farmers would be less likely to acknowledge the supreme religious importance of working the land. Families and the earth had a reciprocal relationship. All people should “resolve, each in his own way, to be better keepers of the

Holy Earth which God has created to be the home of his children, and wherein we all dwell.”64 Similarly, in 1958, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson stated that Rural

Life Sunday would “bring an awareness to both rural and urban people of (1) the stewardship implications in the use of land and the conservation of national resources; (2) the development of opportunities for people—particularly our young people—in agriculture and in rural areas so they can work toward the goals to which they aspire; and

(3) gives recognition to the place of the rural family in our total society.”65

The broad agrarian scope of Rural Life Sunday included an important penitential aspect. The first step towards rebuilding and championing rural life was to acknowledge the problems it had already caused. The Rural Life Sunday service at the Federated

Church in Genoa, New York, on May 22, 1938, for instance, included a long penitential invocation in which the congregation confessed communally a large number of sins. In the context of Rural Life Sunday, the allusions to agricultural waste could not have been

64 John H. Reisner, “Some Thoughts on Rural Life Sunday,” box 67, folder 13, NCC Division of Overseas Missions Records, NCC RG 8, PHS. 65 “Rural Life Sunday Participation Urged by Benson; To Be May 11,” Lancaster Farming, May 2, 1958, 2B. 109 missed: “For the goodness of life which we have received thanklessly; for the strength which we have wasted; for the gifts we have not cultivated….for all the beauty of this fair world, and the love of human hearts which we have not appreciated; have mercy upon us,

O Lord.” It was followed later in the service by a Litany of the Common Good, which included a prayer for all farmers, “to bless the labors of the farmer, and grant such favorable weather that he may gather in due season the fruits of the earth: And that it may please thee, likewise to bless all who depend upon the flocks and herds, that the latter may be productive and multiply, that all may rejoice in thy goodness to the glory of thy name.”66 A Rural Life Sunday prayer written by Ralph and Mary Williamson began, “O

Lord our God, we come in humility confessing our sins and shortcomings, and seeking

Thy forgiveness….With Thy abundant world of nature all about us, we have been slow to learn the secrets of Thy holy earth.”67 Even as late as 1967, the congregation of Trinity

Evangelical United Brethren Church in Lomira, Wisconsin, recited together the following invocation at the start of its service: “Almighty God, we praise thee that thou has committed to the hands of men the treasures of thy creation, the wealth of the forest, the riches of the earth, the fertility of the soil, the blessing of water, to use for thy glory and our good. We confess that often we have been unmindful and wasted thy gifts. As we meet together to worship thee, lead us to remember all thy mercies; and grant we pray thee, true repentance and amendment of our ways, that in all things we may honor and glorify thee, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”68 Acknowledging human sinfulness

66 Federated Church of Genoa program, Worship folder, box 2, Hugh Anderson Moran papers, #39-2-972, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 67 Rich, Rural Life Prayers, 13. 68 Trinity Church program, box 56, folder 35, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 110 and wastefulness could then lead individuals (and, presumably, congregations) to attempt a more sensitive and attentive style of life.

Worshipping on Rural Life Sunday

Organizations like the National Council of Churches, as well as local councils of churches, published annual Orders of Service for Rural Life Sunday that could be used or adapted by churches around the country. These suggested services were quite detailed, including texts for calls to worship, prayers, hymns, and appropriate readings. Typically, they also included suggestions for how to decorate the church, and even possible sermon topics.

These suggested programs demonstrate the wide scope of Rural Life Sunday.

Although respect for and stewardship of the earth were certainly central themes, Rural

Life Sunday encompassed a holistic view of rural life. The 1954 Order of Service, for instance, included a call to prayer intended to be spoken by both the minister and the congregation. It began with praise for creation: “We thank thee that thou hast made our land beautiful with mountain and valley, lake and stream, prairie and forest, until our hearts overflow with gratitude for all thy works. We thank thee that thou hast entrusted us with the tilling of the soil, the care of the forests, and the working of the mines.” But for the NCC, awareness of the beauty of creation led necessarily to care for other people:

“Teach us the sacredness of our tasks which provide food for our brother-man and supply him with things needful for his well-being. Make us quick to share our benefits with those who labor in shop and store. May men of the cities and men of the open country 111 learn to live helpfully together that our nation may be prospered and be in accord with thy will.”69

A 1956 worship service text for Rural Life Sunday published by the Ohio Council of Churches further emphasized the themes of the holiday with sidebar notes. On one side of the booklet was a column about the stewardship of “Natural Resources,” and on the other, “Human Resources.” On the left, readers could find suggestions for field trips, including to “strip mining reclamation projects, soil and water conservation, flood control, and all types of proper land use and adjustments.” After all, wrote the council, “If we accept the belief that life itself is sacred, how much less consideration can we give to the soil that sustains life?” On the right, the council argued that keeping people safe, particularly from “accidental injuries and deaths,” was of equal moral importance. “There must be a desire to do nothing which will hinder the purpose which God has for our own individual lives or the lives of others.” In a concluding prayer, the council petitioned

God, “Guide us through this year, making us ever mindful in our work, in our play, in our fellowship with others that we are stewards of the greatest resource of all, human life.”70

Rural Life Sunday was therefore an opportunity to consider the close links between people’s lives and the world around them.

Pastors around the country embraced the message of Rural Life Sunday in their sermons. Rev. George Dolch of Canastota, New York, emphasized to his Methodist congregation in 1957 that stewardship was for more than just farmers: “If we are not the plowers and the planters, we are all part of the community and all sharers in the

69 “An Order of Service for Rural Life Sunday 1954,” box 16, folder 6, NCC Division of Home Missions Records, NCC RG 7, PHS. 70 Ohio Council of Churches, “Rural Life Sunday Worship Service, May 6, 1956,” box 16, folder 6, NCC Division of Home Missions Records, NCC RG 7, PHS. 112 government which sets the policies, and approves or disapproves practices….If we, as partners with God, will accept our stewardship of the treasures of the soil, if we will live righteously, wisely on this earth which God called good, it shall be indeed ‘the Good

Earth,’ God’s garden and our happy home.”71 In 1959, Rev. Kenneth B. Wilson of First

Baptist Church, Newberry, South Carolina, thundered, “CONSERVATION IS A

THEOLOGICAL ISSUE….the Bible teaches that GOD PROPOSES TO REDEEM HIS ENTIRE

CREATION.” Because all of nature was seen as good and worthy of redemption, Wilson, continued, “we cannot be indifferent to the needs of the earth if we are concerned about the needs of our fellowman. Nor can we be indifferent to the destruction of today if we are truly concerned about the provisions of tomorrow.”72 Milton F. Schadegg, pastor of

Rollstone Congregational Church in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, agreed that neglect and indifference were vital problems. “You have but to drive 50 miles in any direction to see the run-down farms, the eroded soil, the unplanned woodlands of scrub-growth,” he told his congregation in 1966. “Therefore the clergy have a moral responsibility to encourage people to be better stewards, and to unite in a program of understanding the needs of the countryside and the country people….Are we to be so bound to machine production— and the automated machine at that—that we will lose the ingenuity and resourcefulness that led many a farmer to be contentedly self-sufficient!”73

Rural Life Sunday became an opportunity for pastors to remind their flocks that conservation was an issue that touched everyone. It was a community problem as much

71 George Dolch, “The Good Earth,” box 57, folder 3, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 72 Kenneth B. Wilson, “Awaiting Redemption,” box 57, folder 10, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 73 Milton F. Schadegg, “Crisis in the Countryside,” box 56, folder 23, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 113 as a specifically farm problem. But it was also therefore a community opportunity, a chance for everyone to realize the vital role they could take in partnering with God to improve a creation that was groaning in travail.

Rural Life Sunday and 4-H

The NCC, like its predecessors, envisioned Rural Life Sunday being as broad an observance as possible. “Both rural and city churches may observe Rural Life Sunday,” the NCC wrote in its 1951 Order of Service. “Parishes consisting of several churches in a circuit or yoked field can make it a parish day for all services and a dinner….Local agricultural organizations such as 4-H Clubs, Future Farmers, Farm Bureau, Grange and

Farmer’s Union, are often willing to attend and share in the services.”74 The presence of these organizations in a Rural Life Sunday service helped the church expand beyond its walls, and bring the entire community together to celebrate rural life. In the early years of the holiday’s observance, the Home Missions Council had similarly called upon university extension departments, farm organizations, and even secular social clubs to partner with churches in promoting Rural Life Sunday.75

Rural Life Sunday had especially close ties with 4-H around the nation. At times,

Rural Life Sunday was even known as “4-H Sunday.” In Huron, South Dakota, the local newspaper reported in 1956 that the holiday “gives 4-H members and rural folks an opportunity to think together about home, community and world events….It recognizes and emphasizes the spiritual value and character building qualities of 4-H club work and

74 “An Order of Service for Rural Life Sunday, 1951,” box 16, folder 6, NCC Division of Home Missions Records, NCC RG 7, PHS. 75 Home Missions Council, “Rural Life Sunday May 10, 1931,” box 17, folder 13, Home Missions Council of North America Records, NCC RG 26, PHS. 114 to help 4-H members understand the ‘Heart H’ service.”76 That same year the Malvern

Leader called upon Iowa 4-H members to attend church, and “join with the thousands of

4-H’ers across the land in asking God’s blessings on Sunday, May 6—4-H Club

Sunday.”77

In some places, 4-H clubs held their own Rural Life Sunday services, while encouraging members to also attend services in their home churches. In Montana, 4-H members from Flathead County and Lake County came together in 1964 for a special

Rural Life Sunday campout at Flathead Lake.78 In 1958, the Caroline County, Maryland,

4-H clubs held their own Rural Life Sunday service at First Methodist Church in Denton.

Children from multiple local clubs had numerous public roles in the service. They sang in the choir, led the congregation in prayers, proclaimed scripture passages, and read the

Service of Dedication.79 Elsewhere, 4-H clubs helped local churches to plan and carry out

Rural Life Sunday services, or were simply given special acknowledgment during the church’s service.80 In 1959 the club in Daniel, Wyoming, went together from Rural Life

Sunday to a picnic and swimming party.81

No matter how they observed it, 4-H members felt deeply invested in Rural Life

Sunday. Mrs. Harris Horn of the Thomasville 4-H Club in York County, Pennsylvania, called the holiday the culmination of each year’s work in 4-H: “These are some of the ceremonies that develop something of the true, the beautiful, and the Divine being with us. Living—Working—Sharing—Worshiping with 4-H members…these are the precious

76 “Rural Life Sunday is Being Observed Today in Nation’s Churches,” Huronite and the Daily Plainsman (Huron, SD), May 6, 1956. 77 Malvern Leader (Malvern, IA), May 3, 1956. 78 “Joint Rural Life Sunday Camp Planned,” Kalispell Daily Inter Lake (Kalispell, MT), April 26, 1964. 79 “Caroline 4-H Rural Life Sunday Observed May 18th,” Denton Journal (Denton, MD), June 13, 1958. 80 “Rural Life Sunday Services Planned,” Lancaster Farming, April 25, 1959; “Churches in Area Will Pay Tribute to Rural Living,” Appleton Post Crescent (Appleton, WI), May 25, 1962. 81 “News of 4-H Clubs,” Pinedale Roundup (Pinedale, WY), June 25, 1959. 115 moments for today and tomorrow and the years to come.”82 One Montana 4-H leader even went so far as to say, “Rural Life Sunday—a name that those who aren’t associated with 4-H would probably look at and say, ‘what does that mean?’”83

4-H was always more about more than just farming. It had long been regarded by agricultural leaders as a useful tool for promoting politics. In 1941, M.L. Wilson, a prominent agricultural economist who had served in the USDA under Franklin D.

Roosevelt, praised the Department of Agriculture for having “promoted a Nation-wide training system for agricultural democracy” in the form of 4-H. Wilson emphasized that

4-H was about more than simply raising better animals; “it also stimulates development of health, sound thinking, and active participation in discussion. It develops tolerance and the spirit of give and take, which are essential in the democratic process.”84

But in addition to politics, for many years 4-H also typically had a strongly

Christian character. The organization was built around four themes: Head, Hands, Health, and Heart. For many years, 4-H clubs promoted Christianity under the Heart heading. “In that regard,” according to one history of 4-H, “4-H was not unlike many public schools that regularly included prayers and other religious themes in their daily activities.”85 In

1936, for instance, W.R. Winterstein of the Iowa Christian Rural Fellowship noted that

“greater interest is being developed in the ‘Heart-H’ and more emphasis is being placed on this phase of the [4-H] Club program. Iowa’s rural churches can vitalize their own youth life by a sensible integration of effort with this movement.”86

82 “What 4-H Means to Me,” Lancaster Farming, October 5, 1974. 83 “Rural Life Sunday Meaning to 4-H Members Explained,” Kalispell Daily Inter Lake (Kalispell, MT), March 2, 1962. 84 M.L. Wilson, “Theory of Agricultural Democracy,” USDA Extension Circular 355 (March 1941), 10. 85 Wessel and Wessel, 4-H, 310. 86 Home Missions Council, “The Church and the Agricultural Situation,” 49-50. 116

But the Christian emphasis came not only through local clubs (analogous to local schools) but also from the highest levels of the organization. In 1951, for instance, the

USDA Extension Service published the text of a Service of Dedication to the Building of a Christian Nation, contributed (and evidently used) by a 4-H club from New Mexico.

This service demonstrates how deeply Christian an organization 4-H could be at the local level, yet its publication in a national USDA circular also suggests the organization’s desire to inculcate these values upon 4-H members as broadly as possible.87

The service began with an opening benediction that recalled the arrival of the

Pilgrims to what would become Massachusetts in 1620, and their “dauntless faith in the promise of national greatness and world blessing….Let us now rededicate ourselves to the building of a Christian nation.” After a prayer for God’s blessing upon the government and upon the citizens of the United States, the assembled 4-H members recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

They followed the Pledge immediately with another pledge, a version that melded evangelical Christian concerns with the core tenets of 4-H: “I pledge allegiance to the

Christian flag and to the Saviour for whose kingdom it stands; one brotherhood, uniting all mankind in service and love. I pledge My Head to clearer thinking, My Heart to greater loyalty, My Hands to larger service, and My Health to better living, for My Club, my Community, and my Country.” The first part was a pledge written by Methodist pastor Lynn Harold Hough in 1907, going along with a Christian flag that had been

87 The following description and quotations are all taken from Gertrude L. Warren, “4-H Club Ceremonials,” USDA Extension Circular 467 (September 1951). 117 devised the same year.88 The second part was the standard 4-H pledge, institutionalized by the national 4-H organization in 1927.89 As part of a service dedicated to creating a

Christian nation, the presence of all three pledges (national, Christian, and 4-H) clearly demonstrated the conjunction between the three forms of identity and allegiance.

By the 1960s, Rural Life Sunday began to seem more anachronistic, as fewer and fewer Americans were engaged in farming. The New York State Council of Churches acknowledged in 1961 that, as American society was no longer primarily rural in character, Rural Life Sunday needed to take a broader view. Despite the increasingly urban and suburban character of the country, however, there were still “certain basic values for all, farm and non-farm folk alike.” These included “the divine source of all our food, fuel, and fibre, lest we forget that this is God’s good earth”; “the sense of community or neighborhood”; and “the value of home.” Although the New York State

Council of Churches made available the NCC’s standard Order of Service for Rural Life

Sunday, it made fewer specifically agricultural suggestions for observing the holiday. It suggested decorating churches with “appropriate Spring flowers and branches” rather than agricultural items. Although it provided a suggested reading list that included texts like Liberty Hyde Bailey’s The Holy Earth and material on environmental conservation,

88 Douglas A. Knight, “Politics and Biblical Scholarship in the United States,” in Foster Biblical Scholarship: Essays in Honor of Kent Harold Richards, edited by Frank Ritchel Ames and Charles William Miller (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010), 84. 89 UC 4-H Youth Development Program, “4-H Pledge,” http://www.ca4h.org/About/History/Pledge/ (accessed May 21, 2013). 118 it also included as many pamphlets and bulletins on Christian community and family life.90

In 1968, Henry McCanna was asked about the continued relevance of Rural Life

Sunday. “All of the nation and the world has benefited from improved agricultural practices,” he said in a letter to a church member. “However, although fewer people are farmers, more of us must be concerned with conservation. Today’s emphasis for Rural

Life Sunday has been broadened to include all segments of the society.” Because the things that improved rural life improved life for everyone, Rural Life Sunday also now had to take a broader, more ecological view.91 The following spring, the NCC encouraged this broader scope, when instead of simply promoting Rural Life Sunday in rural churches, it issued a press release that stated, “Since all men are dependent upon Mother

Earth for their food, homes and material possessions, all churches, urban as well as suburban, will observe the day. Their leaders will stress that life is a unity and is a result of the triune relationship of God, man and nature, each dependent upon the other.”92

Rural Life Sunday, therefore, was a truly agrarian observance—one that focused not just on agriculture but on the general connections between people and land, family and community. It certainly intended to inculcate a stewardship ethic into participants, reminding them that creation was holy and in need of protection, but it also aimed to teach them just as much about family and work.

90 New York State Council of Churches Rural Church Institute, “Your 1961 Rural Life Sunday Packet,” box 55, folder 33, National Association of Conservation District Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 91 Henry A. McCanna, letter to Jane M. Hatch, Sept. 5, 1968, box 61, folder 20, NCC Division of Christian Life and Mission Records, NCC RG 6, PHS. 92 NCC News, 3/28/61, box 61, folder 20, NCC Division of Christian Life and Mission Records, NCC RG 6, PHS. 119

Harvest Home Sunday

Another new holiday that rural reformers championed was Harvest Home Sunday.

It was envisioned as the autumn counterpart to Rural Life Sunday, a time to celebrate the fruits of the harvest and the rural community that came together to bring in that harvest.

Churches were encouraged to decorate with the fruits of the harvest, like bushels of corn or stacks of vegetables, and with other plant material like colorful leaves, ivy, and even cattails. Prayers could be said over a presentation of harvest produce or soil, and thanks given for abundance and for the science of agriculture itself. Hymns with rural themes, like those published in Hymns to the Rural Spirit, might be sung, and guests from the local Farm Bureau could share speeches or statements. Ministers were encouraged to preach on agricultural themes and to give thanks for the productivity of the fields.93

Like Rural Life Sunday, Harvest Home Sunday was a product of the impending

Great Depression. The first observance was held in 1930 on the Sunday before

Thanksgiving. [In Iowa] it was co-sponsored by the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, the state Extension Service, and the county farm bureaus. These farm organizations joined with local churches to promote the new holiday.94 There were, however, predecessors to the modern holiday. Lutheran and Reformed churches in Pennsylvania, for instance, had been holding Harvest Home celebrations as early as 1820. There was no set time; festivals might take place any time in the summer and autumn. In Pennsylvania, however, they typically involved a church picnic accompanied by preaching. In many places the

93 See for instance the suggestions in Iowa Baptist Convention, “1957 Suggestions for Harvest Festival Observances,” and Iowa Farm Bureau, “Suggestions for Harvest Home Sunday Services,” box 60, folder 1, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation Records, MS 105, Special Collections Department, ISU; James William Sells, “An Order of Thanksgiving for Harvest, Land, and Liberty,” and Sells, “The Promise of Life: A Harvest Festival Program,” box 60, folder 1, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 94 Ken Langer to Sandra Stills, Oct. 18, 1957, box 60, folder 1, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation Records, MS 105, Special Collections Department, ISU. 120

Pennsylvania Grange helped co-sponsor the Harvest Home celebrations with local churches.95

Participants in Harvest Home saw clear biblical precedent. The Iowa Baptist

Convention (IBC) attributed the roots of Harvest Home to the ancient Israelite holidays of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Although Pesach (Passover) and Shavuot took place in spring and summer, they were agricultural in nature and tied to the barley harvest. The

IBC lamented that American practice had ceded everything to the national Thanksgiving

Day in November—a holiday that had little to do with agriculture. “This unfortunate trend,” wrote the IBC in 1957, “has produced a nation of town and country churches in whose worship the references to seed-time and harvest are peculiarly lacking.” Harvest

Home Sunday could therefore be an antidote to the non-agricultural American calendar.96

Others agreed that the typical American thanksgiving only went so far. A writer for

Mennonite Life wrote, “Shallow, indeed, is a thanksgiving for material blessings, which is unmindful of the needs of fellow human beings….Whether the material or the spiritual blessings of life are considered, the only proper response to a bounteous, God-given harvest is to share it.”97 Harvest Home was a chance to spread the gifts of God as widely as possible.

The breadth of Harvest Home was important to its chief promoters. E. Howard

Hill, president of the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, emphasized that celebrating Harvest

Home was not just about giving thanks in the local community. The spiritual benefits of such an observance could in fact spread beyond the local and even national borders.

95 Carter W. Craigie, “Grange and Harvest Home Picnics in Chester County,” Pennsylvania Folklife 29:2 (Winter 1979-80), 80-84. 96 Iowa Baptist Convention, “1957 Suggestions for Harvest Festival Observances,” box 60, folder 1, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation Records, MS 105, Special Collections Department, ISU. 97 Erland Waltner, “‘Raise the Song of Harvest Home,’” Mennonite Life 3:4 (October 1948), 4. 121

“Ours is an oasis of Christianity and individual freedom in a world of want and restrictions,” Hill said in 1952. “Sharing our spiritual and democratic resources is just as important as sharing our physical resources. By the next harvest season, may we see evidences of a world that is better fed and clothed—a world whose governments are more responsive to individual wishes—and a world of more perfect brotherhood.”98 Of course,

Christianity had always argued that prayer and worship were beneficial for the world, even if their effects could not be physically measured. But in Hill’s view, Harvest Home was explicitly meant to remind congregants that American abundance could not simply benefit Americans. Rather, congregants were encouraged to see themselves as part of a broader Christian (and perhaps simply human) community, and to share both material and spiritual resources as widely as possible.

As they did for Rural Life Sunday, national organizations provided worship service templates to make it easier for churches to celebrate Harvest Home. The Federal

Council of Churches (FCC) regularly published an Order of Service for a Harvest

Festival to promote its ideals through the holiday. The 1947 service included a long

“Harvest Litany” that called attention to aspects of rural life that the FCC considered essential. “O Lord, how manifold are thy works,” it began; “in wisdom hast thou made them all. The earth is full of thy riches! For the good earth, our nurturing mother and our home….We praise thee, and thank Thee, O God.” In responsorial format, the litany thanked God for the harvest, fruit trees and gardens, livestock, and forests. But it also thanked God for “the farmer’s home, where the mother toils for her children; where the father finds rest from his daily work, and where children learn their first lessons of life

98 E. Howard Hill, “Harvest Home Message 1952,” box 60, folder 1, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation Records, MS 105, Special Collections Department, ISU. 122 and love.” No less important were “all the workers in the countryside,” along with “thy

Church and thy Gospel.” The harvest was an opportunity to call attention and thanksgiving not only to the fruits of agricultural labor, but also to the workers who did that labor, and the families and communities in which they worked and made their homes.99

Local churches carried out the holiday in various ways. One service, held at Blue

Grass and Pleasant Prairie United Presbyterian Churches in Blue Grass, Iowa, in 1961, involved local 4-H members heavily. 4-H boys lit candles on the altar at the beginning of the service, and after a number of hymns, readings, and prayers, both the 4-H boys and 4-

H girls recited their membership creeds. Together the boys and girls then recited the

Apostle’s Creed in unison. The congregation participated in a responsorial prayer of

Thanksgiving, which thanked God for work, homes, friendship, the church, and a variety of spiritual virtues like patience and hope.100 Not everyone appreciated the holiday, though. J.N. Lunde, a Lutheran minister from Calmar, Iowa, critiqued Howard Hill’s

1958 Harvest Home message, complaining to Hill that he had neglected to mention God specifically. “This and the suggestions for decorating the church sanctuary and auditorium with corn shacks and pumpkins is certainly out of place in God’s House.”101

An attention to liturgy and the importance of specifically rural observances was not limited to mainline Protestants. Catholic agrarians also developed new liturgical structures for focusing attention on rural issues. In 1954, for instance, the National

99 “An Order of Service for a Harvest Festival,” box 61, folder 20, NCC Division of Christian Life and Mission Records, NCC RG 6, PHS. 100 Blue Grass and Pleasant Prairie United Presbyterian Churches Harvest Home Service program, Nov. 19, 1961, box 60, folder 1, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation Records, MS 105, Special Collections Department, ISU. 101 MS comments on E. Howard Hill, “Harvest Home Message,” 1958, box 60, folder 1, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation Records, MS 105, Special Collections Department, ISU. 123

Catholic Rural Life Conference published a text for a novena devoted to St. Isidore, the patron saint of farmers. Isidore, a twelfth-century farmer canonized in 1622, was named the special patron of the NCRLC in 1947. Each day of the novena had a different theme, ranging from “Partnership with God” on the first day to “Dignity of Work” on the fourth and “Stewardship of the Soil” on the sixth. Each day’s prayer consisted of a hymn, a psalm, a short additional biblical reading, and prayers directed toward the theme of the day. The NCRLC’s booklet for the novena included short reflections with each day’s text that more fully explained the themes.102

Conclusion

Even after agricultural missions and rural reform became interdenominational projects, they continued to struggle with reaching the people. Interdenominational groups held up traditionally Progressive ideals like efficiency that met with limited support from churchgoers. Reformers suggested closing and consolidating churches. In doing so, reformers attempted to redefine rural communities. At times, this strategy met the needs of people whose churches and communities were struggling. At other times, it was broadly insensitive to the feelings people had about their communities.

Similarly, reformers attempted not only to redefine community but also to rethink what would happen within those communities. Worship was one of the key sites that interdenominational reformers wished to affect, by devising and implementing new religious practices. Like the practice of consolidating churches, these new worship services met with mixed feelings. Rural Life Sunday was celebrated broadly for decades,

102 “Novena in Honor of St. Isidore, Patron of Farmers: Arranged for Parish, Group, and Family Use” (Des Moines: National Catholic Rural Life Conference, 1954). 124 and championed by pastors who believed that their congregants needed to celebrate their rural identities.

It would not be until rural reform began to emerge more directly from below that agricultural missions would begin to be truly successful. The next chapter takes up that change in emphasis. 125

Chapter 3

Co-Workers in the Kingdom: The Lord’s Acre Movement, 1930-1970

Honour the Lord with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine. - Proverbs 3:9-10 (KJV)

Today, especially at churches throughout the South, one can find harvest festivals each autumn held under the name of the Lord’s Acre. Brock United Methodist Church, in

Brock, Texas, for instance, advertises numerous attractions as part of its Lord’s Acre festival: a picnic meal; a country store, silent auction, and live auction, all selling handcrafts and homemade products of all kinds; and balloons, horse rides, and games for children.1 The annual Lord’s Acre auction at Pioneer Memorial United Methodist Church in Abilene, Texas, includes everything from hay bales to homemade desserts to haircuts.2

These festivals pay tribute to, if not exactly revive, one of the most far-reaching and successful examples of Christian agrarianism—the Lord’s Acre movement, which had been founded in 1930.

The Lord’s Acre was a social movement designed to build up rural church congregations and save them from insolvency during the Great Depression. Unlike

1 Brock United Methodist Church, http://www.brockumc.com/LordsAcre (accessed January 6, 2013). 2 Ronald W. Erdrich, “Lord’s Acre yields bounty of giving,” Abilene Reporter-News, Nov. 20, 2012, http://www.reporternews.com/news/2012/nov/20/lords-acre-yields-bounty-of-giving/ (accessed November 29, 2012). 126 reform projects instituted from the top down, the Lord’s Acre had strong support among regular churchgoers. Emerging as a coherent movement from the mountains of North

Carolina in 1930, the Lord’s Acre phenomenon quickly stretched across multiple

Protestant denominations, into many thousands of churches in at least 40 states, and even overseas by the end of the 1930s. It lasted for decades, long after the Depression had passed, and produced millions of dollars of income for churches every year. Yet it has received almost no attention from historians either of farming movements or of rural

Christianity.3

The success of the Lord’s Acre suggests the transition to a second stage of

Christian agrarianism. The challenges of the Depression provided Christian agrarians with a significant opportunity to advance their ideas. To many Americans, it seemed as if the old ways of doing things had failed, on every level. The industrial success of the

1910s and 1920s had failed to prevent the collapse of the nation’s economy. In the 1930s,

Christian agrarians encouraged people to look to each other for assistance. The Lord’s

Acre movement was a method by which communities could help themselves.

Farming and the Depression

Shortly after World War I, the boom years of American agriculture came to a close. During the war, prices for American products had risen dramatically (along with production), due to military needs across Europe. In the summer of 1920, when international demand for American farm commodities slackened, prices for all farm

3 The only contemporary accounts that discuss the movement in any detail are Ager, We Plow God’s Fields, 349-365, although Ager’s biography is not particularly scholarly; Greene, “‘No Depression in Heaven,’” 253-55, though Greene only focuses on Arkansas; and Leedy, “‘A Starving Belly,’” 479-505, although Leedy uses an extremely small source base to discuss the movement. 127 products fell precipitously. Trapped in a bind—sell more goods at worse prices to make a living, or cut back and face poverty—many American farmers continued to produce at the rates they had done during the war. This resulted in large commodity surpluses that only drove prices even lower. And because so many farmers had expanded their operations on credit during the war years, they owed huge sums to banks and insurance companies. The resulting recession in the farm economy lasted for years, with only a brief (and temporary) recovery in the second half of the 1920s.4

When the rest of the economy plunged into hard times after 1929, it seemed like a recurring nightmare to many farmers. Prices plummeted again, and farmers ended up yet again with stacks of unsaleable surpluses, much as they had in the aftermath of 1918.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932, his administration’s agricultural policies acknowledged the situation in which farmers had been mired for years. The

Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and other government offices began working in earnest to correct the economic disparities in commodity farming.

Not everyone welcomed the policies of the New Dealers. The horror with which many Americans viewed the AAA’s decision to slaughter millions of pigs rather than send them to market, for instance, is well documented.5 Others faulted Roosevelt’s administration for ignoring small and family farmers. During the agricultural depression from 1920 onward, many small-time farmers found it difficult to make ends meet. A common solution to insolvency was to sell, and to consolidate farms into larger, more corporate, affairs. The government in many cases supported the trend toward consolidation. As the Depression worsened into the 1930s and farms grew in size, many

4 Hurt, Problems of Plenty, 36-45; David E. Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928-1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 5 Hurt, Problems of Plenty, 76-77. 128 individuals who could no longer afford their own land became tenant farmers, or were pushed off the land entirely. Yet larger farms generally meant more mechanization— requiring less manual labor.6

All of these trends solidified what earlier farm industrialization had already begun: soon, many fewer people would be needed to live in rural areas and work in farming. In the eyes of Protestant agrarians, the changes brought on by depression, consolidation, and corporatization all contradicted the most important value of all— community. Like the reforms described in the previous chapters, the Lord’s Acre movement was intended to cement rural communities together. But it did so in a flexible way that appealed to congregations of all types. It also taught agrarian values in a very direct way, by involving congregants in specific activities and supporting them with theological messages. Participation in the Lord’s Acre resulted in face-to-face contact and collaboration that served to make the community more personal and immediate.

The Lord’s Acre

The Lord’s Acre movement called for church members, and in some cases churches themselves, to dedicate at least one acre of land for the production of crops whose sale would provide money for the church, its minister, and its congregants. If need be, the products themselves could serve to feed the hungry in the community as well. The

6 Van Perkins, Crisis in Agriculture: The Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the New Deal, 1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal (Ames, IA: Iowa State Press, 1982); Wayne D. Rasmussen and Gladys L. Baker, “The New Deal Farm Programs: The Myth and the Reality,” in The Roosevelt New Deal: A Program Assessment Fifty Years After, edited by Wilbur J. Cohen ([Austin, TX]: Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, 1986), 201-219; Michael W. Schuyler, The Dread of Plenty: Agricultural Relief Activities of the Federal Government in the Middle West, 1933-1939 (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1989). The absolute number of farms in the United States peaked in 1934; Hart, “‘Rural’ and ‘Farm’ No Longer Mean the Same,” in Castle, ed., Changing American Countryside, 64. 129

Lord’s Acre movement argued that by dedicating labor and land to the church, small farming communities (and, significantly, their churches) could be maintained and sustained by the communities themselves.

Because it was a religious movement, participants also saw the Lord’s Acre as a way to improve people on a personal level. It was promoted not only for its financial benefits but also for its spiritual, and even psychological, effects. To its proponents, joining the Lord’s Acre movement was a step toward inaugurating the Kingdom of God on earth. Like most social gospellers, advocates of the Lord’s Acre believed that the

Kingdom was “a real, living, and fully functioning community that would be realized through the social application of Christ’s teachings.”7 Applying those teachings meant being educated in good Christian values and morality. The rural world that Lord’s Acre proponents envisioned was one in which communities took care of each other, and it was also one in which “Christian character” was the foundation of that care.

The Lord’s Acre was an important localized rural response to the economic and social challenges of the Depression. But because of the breadth of its intentions, it found success that propelled it into the following decades, even after the immediate crises had passed. While the desire to save family farms was in some ways deeply conservative, it also served to imagine a different way forward into modernity. It provided a kind of social welfare safety net—without using the mechanism of the state.

Alison Collis Greene has recently argued that on the whole, Christian denominations in the United States became much less involved with social services during the 1930s than they had been in previous decades, as the Depression “crippled churches’ finances and forced them to slash services when their members needed help

7 Phillips, Kingdom on Earth, 1. 130 most.”8 Greene argues that during the Depression, mainline Protestantism essentially handed over responsibility for social work and social uplift to the US government.9

As the previous chapters have demonstrated, however, there were numerous institutions within mainline Protestantism that continued to make social service their main focus, particularly in rural areas where economic pressures had been severe even before the Depression. The Lord’s Acre movement followed in this trend, providing a way to keep churches afloat and avoid having to close congregations. Although the emphasis of the Lord’s Acre was not primarily on providing relief for the poor, it was a response to the financial problems in which churches found themselves. The Lord’s Acre stands as a strong example of how individual places reacted to the Depression, a way in which individuals came together to help each other, rather than look outside of their communities for assistance. The Lord’s Acre represents one significant way in which mainline Christianity maintained its public role during the Depression and beyond.

The Lord’s Acre Begins

Throughout the 1920s, churches in various places in the South began to experiment with the idea of encouraging their members to dedicate acres to the benefit of the church. In 1924, Time Magazine reported on a Baptist church in Bluffton, Georgia, where in 1923 seven farmers had signed the following pledge: “We, the undersigned farmer members of the Bluffton Baptist Church, hereby agree to plant, cultivate and harvest one acre from our farm, said acre to be known as the Lord's acre. We agree to turn the proceeds of said acre in to a committee appointed by the Church. They are to

8 Greene, “End of ‘The Protestant Era’?,” 606. 9 Greene, “‘No Depression in Heaven.’” 131 dispose of same and distribute the funds derived from it in such a way as we may instruct.” Here we see the name “Lord’s Acre” in place for the plan. Time reported that despite an outbreak of boll weevil in Bluffton in 1923, the Lord’s acres kept by the

Bluffton farmers were untouched by the pest. Believing that a miracle had taken place, about 100 churches throughout Georgia were set to use the Lord’s Acre plan in 1924.10

In Hartwell, Georgia, the Rev. Marshall Nelms, pastor of Sardis, Rio and Reed

Creek Baptist churches, instituted a similar dedicated acreage plan at his churches around

1924 or 1925. Nelms instituted the plan largely for its financial benefits, as budgets in his rural churches were struggling, but continued to support the plan because of its spiritual aspect; he claimed there was “actually no limit” to the spiritual benefits one might expect from working on a Lord’s Acre project.11

In 1928, Henry McLaughlin, country church director for the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS, or “southern Presbyterians”), had written in a home missions study book for PCUS members about the promising financial results from dedicated acres at a church in Effingham, South Carolina.12 And by 1929, numerous churches in

Louisiana were also using the Lord’s Acre, with expectations that participation would increase dramatically in 1930.13

These experiments were promising, but they did not yet cohere into a true social movement. That would require the leadership and passion of a farmer and preacher who devoted his life to the people of the North Carolina Appalachians.

10 “Lord’s Acre,” Time, September 1, 1924. 11 “Lord’s Acre Page,” Farmers Federation News (hereafter FFN) 12:5 (Jan 1932), 7; “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 13:4 (Dec 1934), 21. 12 McLaughlin, Christ and the Country People, 83. 13 “Rural Churches Will Plant ‘Lord’s Acres’ for Benevolent Causes That Are Supported by Organization,” The Ruston Leader (Ruston, LA) 23:37 (19 March 1930), 1. 132

James G.K. McClure and the Farmers Federation

James Gore King McClure, Jr. was born in Illinois in 1884, the second child of

Rev. James Gore King McClure, Sr. and his wife Phebe Ann.14 The elder McClure was pastor of Lake Forest Presbyterian Church in Lake Forest, Illinois, a prosperous Chicago suburb, and later became president of Chicago’s McCormick Seminary. The younger

McClure, eventually called Jim to differentiate him from his father, spent time working on cattle ranches in Texas before entering Yale (which his father had also attended) in the fall of 1902. Like his father, he was tapped for the exclusive and highly secretive Skull and Bones society. Throughout his time at the university he taught Sunday school, and upon graduation appears to have briefly considered a career in overseas missionary work.

Instead he began theological training at the University of Edinburgh and then at the seminaries of the University of Tübingen (where Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich were also studying at the same time), Berlin University, and his father’s McCormick Seminary in Chicago.

After McClure finished his theological training in the spring of 1910, he served a brief and unsuccessful period as pastor of a Presbyterian church in Iron River, Michigan, but spent years aimlessly traveling the United States as well as abroad. In 1916 he married Elizabeth Cramer, an aspiring painter who had studied in France. They honeymooned in Asheville, North Carolina, and liked the area enough that later that year they purchased an old farmhouse and almost 150 acres up in Hickory Nut Gap, near

Fairview, about twelve miles southeast of Asheville. For some years McClure had been

14 The biographical details in the following paragraphs are all drawn from Ager, We Plow God’s Fields. McClure seems to have rarely if ever used “Jr.” as a regular part of his name, so he will be referred to as “McClure” or at times “Jim”; the reader should understand this always to refer to McClure, Jr. 133 in and out of good health, and he and Elizabeth believed that life in the mountains would do him some good.

Revitalizing the rundown Hickory Nut Gap Farm was the McClures’ primary responsibility over the next few years, although they organized a Red Cross chapter to help the local community, and Jim was occasionally asked to preach in local churches. In

April 1919, along with a number of other local farmers, Jim organized the Fairview

Federation of Farmers. Although McClure was offered the pastorate of a large church in

New York City that spring, he decided to stay in North Carolina and commit to the local farming community. In 1920 that organization became the Farmers Federation of North

Carolina, with its headquarters in Asheville.

The new organization was devoted to improving the economic situation of the mountain farmers. Living in a relatively lightly populated area of difficult terrain, farmers in the region faced considerable difficulty in bringing their products to market. The area was anchored by the city of Asheville, a busy and prosperous town, but many farmers were forced to travel long distances in order to sell their goods. “Eight hours of toil by the carpenter, the mechanic or the mason bring a cash return far greater than the farmer gets for ten hours of toil….Comforts and conveniences have increased in the world, but the

Western North Carolina farmer finds himself unable to buy them,” McClure said. “The only way in which the farmer can gain some leverage is by organizing on the basis of his buying and selling power.”15 Providing the ability to work cooperatively in this way was the central focus of the Federation in its early years. In this work it was part of a nationwide enthusiasm for cooperatives that began about 1920.

15 McClure, “What the Federation is Doing,” McClure Family Papers, Box 1, A.15, SAA. 134

While McClure worked with the Federation on behalf of the livelihoods of farmers, Christianity was still of central importance to his view of the world. McClure would never again hold a formal ministerial position, but occasional guest sermons that he preached throughout the 1920s show his deep personal commitment to Christianity, as well as his growing conviction that religion had everything to do with the quotidian parts of life. “We have come together to study the principles by which we can live better lives, truer lives, happier lives, lives with God in them,” he preached to an African American congregation in Fairview in 1920. “Let [Christ] in – It will energize your goodness, make it dynamic, contagious….Power will flow into you from on high.”16 McClure’s notes for a sermon preached at multiple churches in 1926 show his belief that “this is a spiritual world – only can be happy + grow + develop by Recognizing it + adapting to it.”17 And at the Grove Park School in 1926 he stated that the “fight is won or lost in little everyday things.”18

The Federation’s Religious Department

By 1930 McClure was convinced that the Farmers Federation needed to engage more broadly with the challenges facing rural North Carolina. That year, McClure asked his brother-in-law, Dumont Clarke, to take charge of the Federation’s new religious department—at the time the only such religious department of an agricultural organization in the country. The joining of religious work to the economic work of the

16 Sermon on I Sam 17:33-49 (Fairview Colored Church, July 25, 1920), McClure Family Papers, Box 1, A.14, SAA. 17 Sermon on II Kings 6:8-16 (Brush Creek, Aug 29, 1926; Mills River, Oct 24, 1926; Reeds Chapel, Dec 17, 1926), McClure Family Papers, Box 1, A.14, SAA. 18 “Causes of Success or Failure” (Grove Park School, June 2, 1926), McClure Family Papers, Box 1, A.14, SAA. 135

Federation brought together Jim McClure’s two main passions—the religious training he had received as a youth (both from his family and through his formal seminary education) and his newfound career as a farmer and organizer.

Dumont Clarke had his own long and complicated history in ministry. He had served in India as a missionary for the YMCA, but life overseas did not appear to agree with him. He had worked in boarding schools—the Phillips Andover Academy and the

Lawrenceville School in New Jersey—and as the pastor of a Congregationalist church, but held none of these positions for very long. Still, McClure saw Clarke as the perfect person to lead the religious department of the Farmers Federation.19

Dumont Clarke would be in charge of promoting a new obsession of McClure’s— the Lord’s Acre plan. McClure had heard of the experiments that southern churches had made with dedicated acres, and found it to be a fascinating opportunity for building up responsibility and participation within church communities. He often cited the inspiration of an unnamed church in South Carolina, where the money from dedicated acres of cotton had apparently financed a new church building for the congregation. Although its location was never mentioned, the inspiration from the South Carolina church was also later mentioned in a filmstrip put out to publicize the growing Lord’s Acre movement.20

McClure sent Clarke to visit Baptist and Methodist churches in northern Georgia that

19 Ager, We Plow God’s Fields, 350. 20 McClure mentions the church in, for instance, “Lord’s Acre Plan, Started in 1930, Proves Worth in Fifty Chuches” [sic], Asheville Citizen-Times November 22, 1931, clipping in Farmers Federation Newspaper Clippings Scrapbook 2, McClure Family Papers Box 5, B.2.a.7.a #9, SAA; “The Story of the Lord’s Acre Movement,” filmstrip record produced by the Church and Community Institute, Inc. and Protestant Radio and Television Center, Inc., Atlanta, Georgia (H9SL-2199 [side 1] H9SL-2200 [side 2]), side 1, 2:10, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.2, SAA—though the filmstrip simply says that the church that inspired McClure was located “in the southern United States.” 136 were already using the plan to examine their progress, and even borrowed language from them to use on printed materials that the Federation was creating for its members.21

Leading the religious department of the Federation was a job that took advantage of Clarke’s personality. Clarke was endlessly gregarious, and devoted to spreading the gospel—traits that served him well in approaching church communities to promote the

Lord’s Acre. In 1952, for instance, he described his evangelistic habit of picking up hitchhikers along his travels: “After a friendly talk to indicate a kindly interest in the rider, [I have] regularly turned to him with a smile, saying: ‘I always ask my riders to give me a Bible verse in exchange for the ride.’”22 Visiting churches throughout the country, Clarke’s enthusiasm helped inspire interest in the Federation’s work.

Under McClure’s and Clarke’s direction, six churches in the Asheville vicinity began experimenting with the Lord’s Acre plan in 1930 - Fairview Baptist, Tweed’s

Chapel Methodist, Mills River Presbyterian and Methodist Churches, and Avery’s Creek

Baptist and Methodist Churches.23 These six churches became the iconic successes of the movement, constantly referred to in later promotional literature. But the plan, under the incubation of the Federation, rapidly grew beyond those charter churches. From six churches in 1930, the Lord’s Acre was being used by about 50 churches in North

Carolina the following year, and by over 100 the next. By 1935, over 300 churches of eleven different denominations were using the plan.24

21 “The Lord’s Acre Page Religious Department,” FFN 11:5 (Jan 1931), 7. 22 Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 32:11 (July 1952), 15. 23 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 20:5 (Jan 1940), 11. 24 Information collated from 1930-1935 annual reports of the Educational and Development Fund, McClure Family Papers Box 2, B.1.a.3., SAA. 137

The Plan

The Lord’s Acre was, in its simplest form, a way to strengthen the finances of the local church even when money was not forthcoming. In McClure’s view, the center of any community was its church. Particularly in times of crisis like the Great Depression, how could communities prosper without a strong church to anchor them? But in hard times, many churchgoers found it difficult to spare any money for the support of the church, and collection plates dried up. Without that local support, and in the absence of denominational support from above, pastors might go elsewhere, churches might close, and the spiritual network that joined communities together might evaporate. If country churches were the best protectors of America’s spiritual power and virtue, then they needed to imagine new ways to gain the financial support necessary to keep them open.

For years McClure emphasized the economic basis of the plan. In 1947, to an audience of benefactors at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City, he stated, “Our idea is that there are two ways of getting money in this world. One is by taking it from somebody else, which has been a very popular method. The other, which is the only sound method, is to create the opportunity for people to earn money, and that is what we have tried to do. It seems to me that that is the American way.”25

The simple innovation of the Lord’s Acre, and its primary advantage, was that it allowed churchgoers to contribute to the church from the resource that they had closest to hand—farm produce. Each season, churchgoers who owned farms were exhorted to section off one portion of their farm (generally at least one acre), and pledge it as a

“Lord’s Acre.” Whatever grew on that portion would be donated to the church in a

25 Typescript, proceedings of Farmers’ Federation Picnic, New York City Waldorf-Astoria, Nov 17, 1947, 15, McClure Family Papers Box 4, B.1.b.2.g., SAA. 138 ceremony during the fall harvest. The church could either use that produce directly, as food for the pastor or for hungry congregants, or (more commonly) it could sell that produce and use the money for whatever was most needed in the church budget.

Lord’s Acre projects came in all kinds. Participants could dedicate parts of whatever crop they happened to be growing, from corn to potatoes, sorghum to apples.

Women farmers in particular often pledged a certain number of chickens, or a certain percentage of the eggs their chickens produced. Dairies could pledge the milk from their best cow. Children might be encouraged to raise an animal on their own and then give it to the church when it was ready for slaughter. Typically each church could count on a wide variety of donations. Midway Church, in Anderson, SC, boasted almost thirty different types of projects being carried out by its members in 1932, everything from cotton to peanuts, chickens to canned fruit.26

When putting the products up for sale, churches (in North Carolina at least) could count on the Federation for assistance. The 1930 annual report of the Educational and

Development Fund (the arm of the Federation that oversaw the Lord’s Acre plan) stated that “since the Federation has now reached the point where it can market practically anything that the farmer may raise in the territory of our warehouses we felt that the time had come when we could suggest to the churches that if the members subscribed in kind that we would help them sell whatever was raised for the church.”27 Thus churches could

26 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 13:1 (Sept 1932), 11. A good variety of typical projects is described in “The Story of the Lord’s Acre Movement,” McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.2, SAA. Prior to the 1940s and the mechanization of the poultry industry, raising chickens was typically considered women’s work on American farms. Even today, women are globally more likely to raise animals that provide non-meat products (such as eggs), while men are more likely to be held responsible for grazing and pasture animals; Carolyn E. Sachs, Gendered Fields: Rural Women, Agriculture, and Environment (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 104-111. 27 Farmers Federation Educational and Development Fund, Report of 1930 Expenditures, 9. McClure Family Papers, Box 2, B.1.a.3. #1, SAA. 139 put their products in the hands of the Federation, and take advantage of the Federation’s cooperative marketing benefits.

Together, then, all church members could contribute more effectively. A small

Federation pamphlet called “Raising the Budget of the Country Church” made the point eloquently. One photograph showed three young men trying to lever up from the ground a massive tree trunk. Its caption read, “With only a few faithful members trying to lift the load, a church may struggle in vain to raise its budget. This way, those who do not help cannot be happy, and the church can hardly be strong.” On the facing page, a photograph showed seventeen people—men, women, children—all sharing the lever and easily lifting the trunk from the ground. “With all our farm people carrying through Lord’s Acre projects,” the caption read, “our church can more easily lift its budget load.”28

The Lord’s Acre in Practice

The money that could be earned from selling the donated products might be spent in any number of ways. Quite often they were used to build or repair church structures. In the first two years of its Lord’s Acre work, Fairview Baptist Church (one of the founding

North Carolina churches) was able to wire both the church and its parsonage for electricity, buy light fixtures, and carry out other repairs, all with Lord’s Acre income.29

White Oak Presbyterian Church (Haywood County, NC) paid for new paint, while Mount

Moriah Baptist Churches (Calvert and Cherryfield, NC) both bought new furnaces.30

Normandy Presbyterian Church (Fayetteville, TN) was able to pay for repairs to its

28 “Raising the Budget of the Country Church: What Will Our Church Do?” Lord’s Acre scrapbook, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.1., SAA 29 P.O. Merrill, “A Lord’s Acre Result,” Lord’s Acre Page, FFN 12:4 (Dec 1931), 7. 30 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 17:6 (Feb 1937), 15; FFN 17:8 (April 1937), 15. 140 church building from a fire it had suffered.31 The Federated Church of Masonville, New

York, drilled a well for the church and refinished the church floors.32 When enthusiasm for the plan ran high, the results could be quite dramatic. Dana Baptist Church (Dana,

NC) was founded in November of 1936, and put the Lord’s Acre plan into effect the following spring. That first year, the new congregation brought in an astounding $2,352 from the sales of its projects—including corn, cotton, pigs, apples, sweet potatoes, and popcorn. The congregation was able to build its church building with the financial returns.33

Other examples abound. B.M. Strickland, a pastor who oversaw numerous Baptist churches throughout North Carolina, used the Lord’s Acre in all of them. At Silver Creek

Church in Polk County, Strickland expected at least a hundred dollars from Lord’s Acre projects that year—enough to beautify the church with new flowers and plantings.

Good’s Creek Church paid for new church pews in the summer of 1937 with Lord’s Acre receipts. Sulphur Springs Church in Rutherford County had an even more ambitious goal in mind—the construction of an entirely new church building. Though the church received substantial amounts of cash through direct donations, money was also gathered through Lord’s Acre projects. The church itself ran a 20-acre cotton farm, and at least 35 church members pledged Lord’s Acre donations of eggs or chickens. Girls attending the church school raised cotton as class Lord’s Acre projects, each class contributing at least a bale.34

31 FFN 29:6 (Feb 1949), 15. 32 Harold E. Hammer, What the Lord’s Acre Did for This Church (New York: American Baptist Home Mission Society, 1943), 5. 33 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 18:6 (Feb 1938), 15. 34 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 18:4 (Dec 1937), 19. 141

Other churches used Lord’s Acre projects to sustain their pastors or to provide general benevolence to their communities. Mt. Zion Baptist Church (Swain County, NC), for instance, saw “practically the entire church” participate in Lord’s Acre projects in

1938, dedicating things like corn, peas, chickens, and eggs. Through the plan’s proceeds, the church was able to nearly double the pastor’s salary, and “this past year we gave twenty dozen cans of vegetables to the orphanage which is much more than we have ever given before,” according to the Sunday school superintendent.35 Brittain Presbyterian

Church (Rutherfordton, NC) spent its proceeds (from cotton, potatoes, berries, dairy products, and music lessons, among other things) on donations to missionaries as well as to a pension fund for ministers.36

Participants praised the financial effects of the plan. L.L. Burgin, the treasurer of

Mills River Presbyterian Church, one of the founding North Carolina churches, wrote that

“it has been the experience of our church that the [church’s] financial standing at the end of the year varies directly with the number on the roll who select this way of meeting their part of the obligations….I can think of no better way for a country church to face the financial problems that lie ahead than by adopting the ‘Lord’s Acre’ plan.”37

Tweed’s Chapel Methodist Church, one of the first churches in North Carolina to take up the plan, had a particularly successful experience. Tweeds Chapel followed the plan for three successful years, during which members contributed their own individual products and labor for the profits of the church. In 1934, members of Tweeds Chapel decided to expand their ambitions. They decided as a group to purchase some dedicated

35 FFN 18:10 (June 1938), 15. 36 FFN 19:5 (Jan 1939), 15. 37 L.L. Burgin, “The Lord’s Acre Plan in Actual Experience,” The Lord’s Acre Page, FFN 12:3 (Nov 1931), 7. 142 land to devote, collectively, to the Lord’s Acre work. The congregation purchased eight acres of land near the church and plowed it to ready it for crops. On February 27, Dumont

Clarke visited the church’s farm and conducted a dedication ceremony, leading the congregation in prayers, blessings on the land, and recitations of Bible verses from memory, including Psalm 24:1 (“The earth is the lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein”) and 1 Corinthians 15:58 (“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord”).

The project was noteworthy; McClure said it “has in it the spirit of a true revival.

It has impressed all those who know about it with the high purpose it expresses—men united in work with hands and minds and hearts for the Lord.”38 This dedicated church farm produced hundreds of bushels of potatoes, enabling the church to pay off its debts.

Thomas Nesbitt, a member of the church, called it “both an inspiration and a blessing,” and noted how much the children in particular enjoyed working on the project.39 The church’s pastor agreed that “without the Lord’s Acre proposition it would have been impossible for this church to have paid the pastor’s salary and Conference claims.”40

The Lord’s Acre appealed to both black and white congregations, and it was promoted across racial lines (see Figure 1). By 1940 the Federation was reporting that black churches of all the main southern denominations were using the plan, the same as white churches. In 1942, a particularly successful black church, East Freedom

Presbyterian Church in Raeford, North Carolina, became a demonstration center for other

38 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 13:8 (April 1933), n.p. 39 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 15:4 (Dec 1934), 22. 40 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 17:3 (Nov 1936), 15. 143

Figure 1: Church members at an unidentified church, holding samples of their Lord's Acre projects. Photograph 82-10-479, James G.K. McClure Family Papers, Southern Appalachian Archives, Mars Hill College, Mars Hill, North Carolina.

144 black churches in the area.41 That summer, Clarke visited numerous summer schools for black ministers, at historically black institutions like Tuskegee Institute, the Gulfside

Assembly in Waveland, Mississippi, Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and

Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. At all of these institutions he heard reports that “considerable Lord’s Acre work was found to be already in progress among Negro rural churches.”42 Clarke reported that the ministers he met at the institutes, along with the communities he visited himself, all reported that “the

Lord’s Acre plan offers a most practical means for providing the additional support that is so greatly needed for the Negro country church. It definitely increases interest in the church, it helps to solve the problem of support from tenant farmers, and it is training many in Christian stewardship.”43

Although the plan was particularly difficult for sharecroppers to implement— since they did not own their own land and could rarely choose to donate portions of their crop as opposed to turning them over to the landlord—churches could find ways around these strictures. Rev. Samuel M. Dixon, a farmer and Baptist minister from south-central

North Carolina, learned about the Lord’s Acre at the Ministers’ Institute held at Shaw

University in Raleigh. In 1945, he began instituting projects in one of the churches under his ministry. Teal Chapel Baptist Church, across the border in Chesterfield, South

Carolina, was a small church, with only about eighty members. All but four families in the church were sharecroppers, so Dixon rented two acres of land himself and invited church members to start Lord’s Acre crops on that land. The church members, especially

41 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 21:3 (Nov 1940), 23; “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 22:9 (May 1942), 19. 42 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 23:1 (Sept 1942), 19. 43 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 23:2 (Oct 1942), 23. 145 the boys, helped plant cotton. The harvest yielded a fairly impressive one bale of cotton from each acre, and the cotton sold for over $360, which the congregation used to help fund a new church building. The landlord was apparently impressed enough with the result that he allowed Dixon to rent the land for free.44

Praise and Criticism for the Lord’s Acre

Though for the first few years of the 1930s the Lord’s Acre was still primarily a

North Carolina phenomenon, it quite quickly began to attract attention from national and international figures. In February 1935, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace visited Asheville to celebrate the plan’s fifth anniversary (see Figure 2). Wallace, who had a longstanding interest in religion and spirituality (especially Theosophy) in addition to agriculture, saw the plan as a tremendous opportunity to improve and uplift rural

America—because it combined farming with religion.45

On February 23, before an audience of over one thousand gathered at Asheville’s

Central Methodist Church, Secretary Wallace criticized capitalism for its negative effects upon spirituality. “Capitalism has influenced people to divorce their minds from spiritual things,” Wallace said. “Many city churches are under capitalistic rule. The Lord’s Acre plan carries us back toward pre-capitalistic days, to days when we had sympathy with better things….And, after all, the Lord is more a Lord to plants and real living things than to factories, brutal force and tallied thought.” Wallace proclaimed his hope for the birth of a religious revival from the mountains of North Carolina, claiming that “spiritual regeneration” was the best way forward for a nation mired in the Depression. “If the

44 Moses N. DeLaney, “Forward with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” Town & Country Church 38 (Nov 1947), 4. 45 On Wallace’s spiritual views see especially White and Maze, Henry A. Wallace, 16-43; Culver and Hyde, American Dreamer, 76-82. 146

Figure 2: L-R: James G.K. McClure, Jr.; Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace; Dumont Clarke; R. Douglas Stuart (chairman of the industrial advisory board of the National Recovery Administration), in Asheville, North Carolina, February 25, 1935. Photograph 82-10-20, James G.K. McClure Family Papers, Southern Appalachian Archives, Mars Hill College, Mars Hill, North Carolina. 147 peoples in the mountains…are able, and will, instill in the minds of their children in their early days the idea that the world is one world, that man is more than an economic animal and that God is the One God of all the World, they will make the United States more alive in the Kingdom of God than ever before.”46

The next year, the Federation received a visit from Toyohiko Kagawa, a Japanese

Christian evangelist and activist. Kagawa, who was then at the height of his prominence, was a strong promoter of labor unions and cooperatives, and the work that the Federation was doing resonated with his own Kingdom of God movement.47 Kagawa toured the

United States for six months and preached in “hundreds of revival type cooperative meetings largely held in churches.”48 On January 13, 1936, Kagawa addressed a speech called “The Cooperative Spirit and the Kingdom of God” to the annual Lord’s Acre meeting held by the Federation in Asheville, attended by nearly 2000 people.49 Kagawa praised the Federation for promoting what he called “real Christianity.” “Many of you would think that [the Lord’s Acre] is only for the financial aid of the country churches,” said Kagawa, “but for me it is the best method of education for the elders and the young people to bring up their heart and soul to God.” Kagawa reminded the audience that the real goal of Christian life was to imitate Jesus, not to become wealthy. And imitating

Jesus meant living an agrarian life. “Living in the country district, having more joy in nature, loving the soil, loving the neighbor, loving God, we shall have a real civilization.”

46 “Fate of Relief Plan Hangs in Balance; Farmers Hear Wallace Talk at 2 Meetings,” Asheville Citizen- Times, February 24, 1935, 1. McClure Family Papers Box 5, B.2.a.7.a, SAA. 47 On Kagawa see especially David P. King, “The West Looks East: The Influence of Toyohiko Kagawa on American Mainline Protestantism,” Church History 80:2 (June 2011), 302-320; Anri Morimoto, “The Forgotten Prophet: Rediscovering Toyohiko Kagawa,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 28:3 (2007), 292-308; though neither mentions Kagawa’s interest in the Lord’s Acre. 48 Joseph G. Knapp, The Advance of American Cooperative Enterprise, 1920-1945 (Danville, Ill.: Interstate Printers, 1973), 390. 49 “Large Audience Hears Address by Dr. Kagawa,” [Asheville Citizen-Times], January 14, 1936, Farmers Federation Newspaper Clippings Scrapbook 2, McClure Family Papers Box 5, B.2.a.7.a #9, SAA 148

Kagawa agreed that there was no better way than the Lord’s Acre to get people in touch with the soil. “Some children thought the soil was very dirty,” he said, “but now they begin to love it….So once a week I send them to the soil and say ‘Baptise with the soil.’

Unless you baptise children they can never be converted to God.” Though the prospect of a soil-based baptism might have horrified more orthodox Christians, the metaphorical baptism that the Lord’s Acre produced—that of initiating people into close connection with God’s earth—was clear and necessary.50

Certainly the Lord’s Acre was not successful everywhere. Alison Collis Greene notes that the Lord’s Acre plan was not very popular in rural Arkansas, where more than half the rural population were tenant farmers: “Many tenant farmers in the Delta and elsewhere would have been thrilled to own enough land to plant an acre for the church.

But often neither they nor their churches could claim even a square inch of soil as their own.” She notes that the Southern Baptist Conference stopped trying to promote the

Lord’s Acre plan in the Delta area after 1936. Greene’s opinion of the program is negative, and overlooks the great success it had elsewhere: “During its short existence [in the Delta],” she writes, “the program demonstrated the disconnect between denominational priorities and church members’ needs.”51

Other churches struggled at times also. One member of Zion Evangelical and

Reformed Church in Metropolis, Illinois, reported that his church had had a difficult time generating active participation, and that the spirituality of the plan had been overshadowed: “We have not actually accomplished the true spirit of the project. There still remains to [sic] much emphasizes [sic] on the amount given. Likewise the constant

50 “The Lord’s Acre Meeting: Address of Dr. Kagawa,” FFN 16:6 (Feb 1936), 3, 15. 51 Greene, “‘No Depression in Heaven,’” 254-55. 149 need of proding [sic] doesn’t seem to indicate a grasping of the true purpose of the Lord’s

Acre.” He remained optimistic, though: “However, so many other good things come out of this idea that it is well worth trying.”52

Although the Lord’s Acre was designed to build community, where there was too little community spirit in the first place people found it particularly difficult to institute the plan. Rev. Oscar Chindberg of Manteno Methodist Church (Manteno, Illinois) described the farmers in his region as “almost ultra individualistic in attitude,” even though organizations like the Farm Bureau and businesses like cooperative grain elevators were popular. “The soil is rich and the farmer regards himself as [a] businessman,” said Chindberg. “It is folly to think that the cooperative principle is part of the thinking of Central Illinois People on the basis of the number of so called Cooperative

Farm Elevators.” In his assessment, the Lord’s Acre would be unable to take root unless farmers already saw themselves as partners rather than as competitors.53 Similarly, Mount

Union Church in Everett, Pennsylvania, affirmed that a church would need a “lay group interested in the idea to make it successful, and largely take initiative”—a group their church evidently lacked.54

Despite these challenges, through a majority of the country enthusiasm over the project lasted for decades, and demonstrated that the Lord’s Acre did often meet church members’ needs—perhaps precisely because it was not instituted or promoted by a denominational structure. The Lord’s Acre operated outside of traditional church bodies, and could be tailored to the needs of any particular congregation, even a nonfarming one.

52 “The Lord’s Acre Plan” book of questionnaires #1 [1943], Ralph Felton Papers Box 1, DUA. 53 “The Lord’s Acre Plan” book of questionnaires #2 [1943], Ralph Felton Papers Box 1, DUA 54 “The Lord’s Acre Plan” book of questionnaires #1 [1943], Ralph Felton Papers Box 1, DUA. 150

Promoting the Movement

Dumont Clarke’s promotional efforts for the plan were relentless. Farmers

Federation News, the monthly newspaper of the Federation, carried a column each month relating the progress of the movement and offering suggestions for growth. By 1936,

Clarke was regularly traveling far and wide around the country promoting the plan. That year, in addition to Methodist and Presbyterian conferences in North Carolina, he visited the Virginia Rural Church Conference in Blacksburg, the General Assembly of the

Presbyterian Church in Syracuse, New York, and the New England Rural Church

Conference in Orchard Beach, Maine.55 The plan quickly spread beyond North Carolina into churches throughout the nation. By 1941, the Federation estimated that somewhere between 1800 and 2800 churches nationwide were using the plan—and only 800 of those churches were in North Carolina.56

Clarke regularly traveled great distances to promote the Lord’s Acre. In 1939, for instance, he spent sixteen days traveling throughout Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee,

Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas.57 In 1942 he traveled again through the lower

Mississippi Valley and the deep South, giving twenty speeches about the Lord’s Acre in fifteen days.58 In 1946 he traveled north towards Pennsylvania and New York, stopping along the way at the Scarritt College Rural Center in Nashville (where he lectured to missionaries visiting from around the world); the Annville Institute of the Reformed

Church in America in Annville, Kentucky; and the Southeastern Young People’s

55 Ninth Annual Report of the Educational and Development Fund of the Farmers Federation (1936), 8. McClure Family Papers, Box 2, B.1.a.3. SAA. 56 Fourteenth Annual Report of the Educational and Development Fund of the Farmers Federation (1941), 5. McClure Family Papers, Box 2, B.1.a.3. SAA. 57 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 19:12 (Aug 1939), 50. 58 FFN 22:7 (March 1942), 27. 151

Conference of the Ohio Council of Churches, as well as numerous individual churches. In

Pennsylvania, Clarke visited churches belonging to the Methodist Rural Conference, and endured flash flooding along the Susquehanna River in Williamsport and Sunbury. He then attended the conference of the New York Christian Rural Fellowship in Lisle, New

York, and gave a radio broadcast about the Lord’s Acre on WGY in Schenectady, New

York.59

In addition to the Federation’s own promotional efforts, the Lord’s Acre movement was repeatedly profiled in national publications. Understandably, many religious organizations took an interest in the movement. The Christian Endeavor

Society, an evangelical youth ministry organization, reported on the Lord’s Acre in 1943, explaining how it worked and describing multiple examples of projects. “We invite the news reports and photographs of the Christian Endeavor groups that participate this year—and later—in Lord’s Acre programs,” wrote the society. “It seems certain that each society sharing in such a united effort will find that there are important spiritual benefits in the Lord’s Acre plan.”60

Ralph Felton, professor of ministry at Drew Theological Seminary, published a pamphlet on the Lord’s Acre in 1946. The pamphlet was published cooperatively by the

Home Missions Council of North America and the Phelps-Stokes Fund Committee for the Training of Negro Rural Pastors, giving it a wide distribution. Felton gave an overview of the plan and described the results from studies he and his students had made of participating churches. Felton emphasized the spiritual cooperation inherent in the plan: “The minister preaches the ‘Word of God.’ The farmer deals with the ‘Works of

59 FFN 26:10 (June 1946), 19; FFN 26:11 (July 1946), 19. 60 “We Plant, Hoe, Harvest for God,” Christian Endeavor World 59:3 (1 July 1943), 2. 152

God.’ He cooperates with God in feeding the world. The farmer’s task takes on spiritual meaning in so far as he enters into this cooperative relationship.”61

The movement was also repeatedly discussed in the farm press. Clarke himself wrote an article for the journal Progressive Farmer in 1937 that described the Lord’s

Acre’s “great fundamental values for both the material and spiritual upbuilding of the country church.” Clarke emphasized the earthly eschatology of the movement. “A church that seeks the Kingdom of God will have its members at work for God. And the Lord’s

Acre plan is the only practical plan, today as in Bible days, for putting all the people in the country church, from the youngest to the oldest, at work for its support and spiritual upbuilding.”62 Progressive Farmer, which gave regular attention to Christianity and to rural church issues, repeatedly praised the movement; in fact, in 1951, Progressive

Farmer named Clarke its “Man of the Year in Service to Southern Agriculture.”63

Another popular farm journal, Country Gentleman, carried an article in 1945 that called the Lord’s Acre “far more than just a scheme to pay off a church building debt, put a new roof on the parsonage or add a Sunday-school room to the church grounds. It’s something vital and practical which links man with a higher Power through the soil, the rain, the sunshine, the seasons and the first fruits of the land.” The reporter described in detail how a church could go about starting the program—with the result that readers,

61 Felton, The Lord’s Acre, 31. 62 Dumont Clarke, “One Acre for the Lord in 1937,” Progressive Farmer, January 1937, 7, 20, Scrapbook of Farmers Federation Newspaper Clippings #2, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.2.a.7.a. SAA. 63 See for instance Betsy Seymour, “Thanksgiving Church Did It: Maybe Your Church Could,” Progressive Farmer (Carolinas-Virginia Edition) 65:11 (Nov 1950), 70,79; William C. LaRue, “Start a ‘Lord’s Acre’ Program,” Progressive Farmer (Carolinas-Virginia Edition) 68:4 (April 1953), 38; James W. Sells, “By- Products of the Lord’s Acre,” Progressive Farmer (Carolinas-Virginia Edition) 69:4 (April 1954), 60-61. Sells, the rural church columnist for Progressive Farmer, routinely mentioned the Lord’s Acre in his column. On Clarke’s award see “Rev. Clarke is Honored,” Times-News (Henderson, NC), December 21, 1951, 3; Clarence Poe, “Why Not Try the ‘Lord’s Acre’ Plan in Your Church, 1952?” Progressive Farmer (Carolinas-Virginia Edition) 67:1 (Jan 1952), 106. 153 even if they chose not to contact the Federation, had the basic knowledge needed to participate. This was generally the case when the Lord’s Acre was mentioned in a popular publication.

National publications helped expand the movement. In 1949, a writer for the livestock journal Breeder’s Gazette declared his interest in extending the Lord’s Acre more explicitly to livestock farms. Although church members had been engaging in

Lord’s Acre projects based around animals for years, Samuel Guard felt there was room for livestock raisers to make a clearer commitment to the movement. Guard had spoken with Clarke and with Ralph Felton, whose pamphlet on the Lord’s Acre had sold 17,000 copies.64 Felton had intimated to Guard how effective the plan might be in the hands of his readership. “Whatever does the man mean,” wrote Guard with a rhetorical flourish,

“that we Breeder’s Gazette people would know whether or not we could restore our rural churches as flowing powerhouses for social good in the open country—merely by dedicating a heifer or calf, a sow or pig, a ewe or lamb, a mare or colt, a hen or chicks,

Sunday eggs, peewees, scallawags, or purebred cows to the Lord?”65 Guard requested comments from the Breeder’s Gazette readership as to whether or not they thought a

“Lord’s Livestock” movement had potential. Felton himself wrote a few months later in

Breeder’s Gazette about a church in the Catskills that had adopted the plan after reading

Guard’s article. Despite initial skepticism, Felton reported that “4 adults were baptized and 6 members were received into the church…as a direct result of this new program.”

There were other benefits as well: one woman reported to Felton that “‘with the Lord’s

Cow in the barn the men aren’t so likely to kick the calf across the barn floor; they will

64 Sales statistics are from “A Report Regarding Rural Church Bulletins, May 11, 1950,” Ralph Felton Papers Box 1, DUA. 65 Samuel R. Guard, “The Lord’s Livestock,” Breeder’s Gazette 113:12 (Dec 1948), 5, 10-11, quote 10. 154 pick it up and carry it.’”66 The experiment evidently convinced Samuel Guard; later in

1949 he proposed that the USDA take a more direct role in saving rural churches throughout the country, because the rural church had the potential to be “the greatest social force in American agriculture.”67

Even those who were not farmers or did not have an explicit interest in religion could have easily learned about the movement and its growth. National magazines with a general readership profiled the movement on numerous occasions. Published articles, whether in farm, religious, or general publications, rarely carried any criticism of the movement, so their praise must be recognized at least in part as boosterism. Nevertheless, the regular appearance of the movement in national publications gives evidence of how widely the movement was noticed and how influential it appeared at the time.

In 1932, for example, Survey Graphic, an important voice in progressive politics, published an article on McClure and the activities of the Federation. The reporter emphasized the religious dynamic of the Federation’s work. “What becomes, then, of

McClure the preacher of the gospel? He never got this in McCormick Seminary! Don’t worry about that. The faith of his fathers is as much to McClure as ever, and he often preaches to these mountain people who are intensely religious—overwhelmingly

Protestant.” The reporter called the Lord’s Acre plan “one of the outstanding activities of the Federation.”68 Another published profile from 1934 quoted McClure as saying, “‘We are trying to make strong the foundations of country life….These foundations are not economic only but also spiritual.’ To further this high ideal the federation employs a

66 Ralph A. Felton, “The Lord’s Cow,” Breeder’s Gazette 114:4 (April 1949), 22. 67 Samuel R. Guard, “Save Our Country Church,” Breeder’s Gazette 114:9 (Sept 1949), 8, 24-25, quote 25. 68 John Palmer Gavit, “Bootstrapping Among the Pioneers,” Survey Graphic July 1, 1932, 304-306; McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.2.a.1.a. SAA. 155 minister, Reverend Dumont Clarke, to give his full time to the work of promoting the efficiency of the rural mountain churches.”69 Coronet published a profile of the Lord’s

Acre in 1944, describing the wide variety of projects that people could adopt, and praising the results: “the country churches have again come into the black, able to burn their mortgages, pay their pastors respectable salaries and to embark fearlessly on new building projects.”70 Time reported on the growth of the Lord’s Acre movement in 1938 and 1941, praising the movement for its ability to generate income of all kinds, and describing the pride that farmers took in their Lord’s Acre labor.71

In April 1941, Reader’s Digest published a condensed version of an article that appeared simultaneously in the Christian Herald. Jo Chamberlin visited churches throughout North Carolina to see the effects of the movement, and was suitably impressed. “I visited Dana [Baptist] Church, talked with its people,” she wrote. “I could not only see but feel its spirit of accomplishment. There was nothing of that situation common in other churches, where a few people carry the financial load and do all the work.” Chamberlin noted in particular the plan’s effectiveness among children. At Mills

River Presbyterian church in Horse Shoe, North Carolina, Chamberlin spoke with numerous children who were raising animals and produce of their own to donate to the church. “Frances Burgin, 16, was fattening a calf, her personal Lord’s Acre project. It was no ordinary animal in her eyes.” Of another child she wrote, “Anybody who feeds a pig twice a day through a season, definitely planning to give that pig away, is developing a quality of character that will stick.” Chamberlin concluded that the plan represented an

69 R.W. Prevost, “A Preacher who Changed His Text,” The State, April 7, 1934, 3-6; McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.2.a.1.a. SAA. 70 Kin McNeil, “The Lord is Their Partner,” Coronet, January 1944, 132-33. 71 “Lord’s Acres,” Time, April 18, 1938; “More Acres for the Lord,” Time, July 28, 1941. 156 important new way to make religion relevant and active for all: “It gives the average person a share in the working church, a voice in a gospel of action. It enables the country church to face the future with courage.”72

In 1946 even the Saturday Evening Post, one of the largest circulating magazines in the country at that point in time, carried a substantial feature on the Lord’s Acre movement, accompanied by numerous photographs of North Carolina church communities. The article described a visit to a Lord’s Auction being held at Thanksgiving

Baptist Church near Selma, North Carolina, in rural Johnston County. This auction “isn’t at all the usual kind of church bazaar….For a year the farmers and housewives of

Thanksgiving have been putting aside the best that they produced, to be given to

Thanksgiving Church and sold at the Lord’s Auction, so that the church’s work could go forward.” Over the course of ten years working with the Lord’s Acre plan, Thanksgiving

Church had completely turned around its finances, its yearly budget expanding from $400 to over $4000 on the success of the Lord’s Acre projects, and had been able to fund a new church building from the annual auction’s proceedings.

Describing McClure and the formation of the movement, the reporter praised the nondenominational aspect of the plan and its ability to adapt to nearly any situation. “The plan is a mixture of simplicity and mysticism,” the reporter wrote. “It is founded upon the ancient truth that ‘the earth is the Lord’s’ and it draws its breath from one of the eternal mysteries, the bond between man and the soil, common to all races and all climes. Yet it uses as its media and machinery the familiar experiences and routine of everyday life and work.”

72 Jo Chamberlin, “Harvesting the Lord’s Acre,” Reader’s Digest, April 1941, 121-124; quotes at 122, 123, 124. The original article is found in Christian Herald 64 (April 1941), 30-31, 69, 71. It includes numerous photos that are not reprinted in Reader’s Digest. 157

This was one of the central strengths of the Lord’s Acre movement: its ability to be at once fully practical, embedded in the daily rhythms and work that its membership was already doing—and also deeply spiritual, engendering among its members a clear sense of responsibility for their local church. The author went so far as to suggest that the popularity of the Lord’s Acre movement could be evidence of a nascent revival in

American Christianity. “This could not be a revival in the old sense….It would be gentle rather than militant, free from hysteria and devoid of bigotry. It springs straight from that awareness of ‘the Power not ourselves’ which the Lord’s Acre plan, rooted in the good earth, can and does bring to many a man who has his own roots in the soil, as many men have in every land where the sun shines and crops grow.”73

It was a sentiment that likely would have resonated with many participants.

Herman Duncan of Black Mountain Methodist Church affirmed, for instance, that revivalism was good, but that emotions had to be tempered by the daily living of a

Christian life. “May God help you and me to be fervent in spirit but God-guided in our emotions,” he prayed; “so that our seasons of revival will be to live anew, to live again the good things of God.”74 Rev. Dargan Butt of Holy Cross Church (Episcopal) in Valle

Crucis, NC, praised the Lord’s Acre because it “enables the people to feel that the churches are in sympathy with their life, that there is something that they can do about it, that the Church comes into their home, and on to their farm, and meets them on their common ground in their common experience.”75 Holy Cross went on to plant a church garden of its own, which Butt saw as a deeply sacramental project: “It has incarnated the

73 Herbert Ravenel Sass, “Lord’s Auction,” Saturday Evening Post, November 23, 1946, 30-32, 82-87; quotes at 82, 85, 87. See also “History of Thanksgiving Baptist Church,” http://thanksgivingbaptistchurch.org/History/history.shtm (accessed June 4, 2012). 74 Herman F. Duncan, “Thoughts About Revival,” FFN 14:1 (Sept 1933), 15. 75 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 16:8 (April 1936), 19. 158 spirit of Christ into the daily task,” he wrote in 1940. “It is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”76

Growth and Inclusivity

On January 20, 1940, the Federation celebrated the tenth anniversary of the

Lord’s Acre movement. Though the mercury stopped at only 1 degree Fahrenheit that day, around 300 people gathered in the First Baptist Church of Asheville to hear speeches commemorating the good work that the religious department had been doing. McClure declared his belief that the Lord’s Acre was “the greatest movement going on in the church in America today.” He emphasized that it was absolutely necessary to democracy to preserve small, rural churches: “Unless we maintain our country churches, little voluntary groups of people who are under the dictation of no man or no government or no politicians, unless we can continue these little churches, our whole civilization will be demoralized and go to pieces.” The “ruthless brutality” of dictators like Hitler and

Mussolini could only be stopped, McClure said, by a revitalized Christianity that could attack both fascism and materialism—“materialism that has crept into all life all over this country.” “I believe it has possibilities,” said McClure, “to put new life into the retreating churches all over this nation, and to bring back the principles of Christ into this land of ours, where so many thousands and millions of our people have gone off after other gods and knelt down before the golden calf.”77

Other speakers that day agreed with McClure. Hoyt Blackwell, then president of nearby Mars Hill College, lauded the plan for being inclusive. “It opens a door of

76 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 21:4 (Dec 1940), 15. The masthead of this issue reads 22:4 but it was actually volume 21. 77 James G.K. McClure, “The Country Church and Christian Civilization,” FFN 20:6 (Feb 1940), 5, 14. 159 opportunity and of service,” said Blackwell in biblical language, “to the person of one talent—of any talent at all—to the person of two talents, whatever they may be, and to the person of five talents, if he will but enter.” Blackwell stated his belief that the Lord’s

Acre “is destined to become a major activity in a large majority of our country churches.”78 In his speech, Pastor R.T. Baker of Duncan’s Creek Presbyterian Church

(which had brought in $265 through Lord’s Acre donations in the previous year) affirmed his belief that “with the writer of the Epistle to James, that ‘faith without works is dead,’ and that we ought to have more work, more evidence of our faith.” It was the kind of thing McClure had been saying for years, that Christians had to live out their faith in their daily lives, and create the Kingdom in every moment. “God wants something more than mere lip service,” said Baker. “He wants more than just mere profession; He wants more than just inspiration and meditation.”79

The plan was inclusive not only of people from all socioeconomic levels, but from different denominations as well. It was ecumenical from the start. By the end of 1940, the

Federation had worked with churches from the major mainline Protestant denominations, including Baptists (Southern, Northern, Free Will, and Holiness, as well as independent black Baptist churches), Methodists (“all former branches,” according to Clarke) and

Presbyterians (including PCUSA, PCUS, Cumberland, and Associated Reformed)—as well as the Churches of Christ, Disciples of Christ, Congregationalists, Episcopalians,

Seventh Day Adventists, Universalists, Lutherans, and Quakers.80

78 Hoyt Blackwell, “Leadership in the Country Church,” FFN 20:6 (Feb 1940), 5, 14. 79 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 20:7 (March 1940), 23. The financial figure is from “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 20:8 (Apr 1940), 11. 80 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 21:3 (Nov 1940), 23. 160

Nor did the Federation look only to churches themselves to spread the word about the Lord’s Acre. The Federation saw 4-H groups and Future Farmers of America/Future

Homemakers of America as useful partners in the effort to interest young people in agriculture and rural life. “Boys and girls,” one Federation poster read, “in your inmost hearts you know that the Church rightfully calls everyone into its service….Your farm and home projects offer you a fruitful way to work for your church. F.F.A. and 4-H Club groups have proved this. Will each one, under the guidance of your teacher or leader, set aside a worthy part of your farm or home project; dedicate it to the Lord; at the harvest season sell it; and give the cash proceeds to your church?”81

In the spirit of inclusivity, the plan had even greater potential, in the eyes of its promoters, than just reaching farmers. In 1941, the Federation reported on the activities of the Methodist charge in Morganton, NC, where Rev. G.R. Stafford had had the idea for non-farmers to donate the proceeds from their first hour of work each week to the church.82 This idea extended the idea of the firstfruits to all labor, not just farming. In response, the Federation began to promote the “Lord’s Hour” as the worker’s counterpart to the Lord’s Acre—a solution more applicable to those who had cash on hand from wages earned, rather than physical products. From the financial perspective, the result was the same. But from a religious perspective, the flexibility of the plan and its applicability to all workers broadened the movement’s constituency, and declared that all

81 “A Christian Program for Future Farmers of America / 4-H Club Boys / Future Homemakers of America / 4-H Club Girls,” Lord’s Acre scrapbook, McClure Family papers, Box 4, B.1.c.1., SAA. 82 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 21:10 (June 1941), 15. 161 labor was valuable and worthy in the eyes of God.83 A participant in Kansas City, MO, agreed: “The first hour on Monday used to be the worst, but now it is the best.”84

The Lord’s Acre Looks Abroad

The success of the plan in the United States, after only ten years of existence, was impressive enough. Yet the Federation leaders fully expected the plan to take root beyond the borders of the United States. Certainly the enthusiasm they saw at home helped them imagine it spreading around the world and ushering in a new era of Christianity. Already by 1932 the Federation was receiving letters of inquiry from American missionaries stationed abroad, including in Burma and the Philippines. “There is increasing interest in this new stewardship,” wrote C.L. Klein, an American Baptist missionary in Burma, “and

I need to know more about what is being done elsewhere.”85 The Philippine Islands

Missionary Conference published a pamphlet on the Lord’s Acre plan that year, and encouraged local churches to celebrate Rural Life Sunday in the way that American

Christians did.86 Individual missionaries often translated documents about the Lord’s

Acre themselves in order to make them more accessible.87

Missionaries sometimes traveled to North Carolina to see the Federation’s progress in person. Kate MacG. Rutherford, a missionary stationed at Missao de Doudi,

Chinguar, Angola, visited Asheville and came away inspired. “What could be more convincing of the simplicity and the naturalness of the Plan,” she wrote, “than the row of

83 See for instance “Promoting the Lord’s Acre in the Country Church,” 8, Lord’s Acre scrapbook, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.1., SAA. 84 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 23:1 (Sept 1942), 19. 85 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 13:2 (Oct 1932), 15. 86 ibid. 87 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 26:2 (Oct 1945), 26. 162 happy little faces of the children of a primary Sunday School class of that very church, each child clasping under his arm his offering to the church—the offering of a farm child—a chicken, fed and cared for lovingly each day for many weeks?” She planned to return to Angola and put the plan into action, “for the need is the same as that felt by the churches in Carolina.”88

Information about the Lord’s Acre was spread by other missionary organizations as well. In 1934, Agricultural Missions, Inc. sent 1400 copies of a Federation pamphlet to fifty different countries, including India, China, Persia, Indonesia (then the Dutch West

Indies), and almost every country and colony in Africa. Agricultural Missions executive secretary John A. Reisner reported that the National Christian Council in China was publishing pamphlets of its own describing the plan.89 The plan soon popped up around the world. Methodist missionaries began experimenting with the plan in colonial

Zimbabwe in the 1940s.90 In 1944 Time Magazine trumpeted, “Lord's Acres now flourish in India, China, Brazil, Mexico and Japan, furnishing rupees, dollars, miireis, pesos and yen for the local missions.”91

As in the United States, not all contributions overseas were large or dramatic, but the plan’s flexibility allowed all to participate to whatever extent they could afford. Rev.

J. Kelly Unger, a Presbyterian minister in Korea, reported that the women of the six churches he oversaw had pledged to each contribute a spoonful of rice to the church each week. “It may be true when God looks down from heaven,” he reported, “that He sees a

Spoon in Korea and an Acre in America, both dedicated to His service, and, in joy over

88 Letter from Kate MacG. Rutherford, FFN 14:10 (June 1934), 11. 89 John A. Reisner, “Broadcasting the Lord’s Acre Broadcast to Foreign Lands,” FFN 14:12 (Aug 1934), 31. 90 Leedy, “‘A Starving Belly,’” 497-500. 91 “More Acres for the Lord,” Time 38:4 (July 28, 1941). 163 the few who are giving, He calls in the angelic hosts, commanding them to lift up their voices on high and sing the praise of such saints down below.”92

Spiritual Benefits of the Lord’s Acre

In addition to its numerous material and practical benefits, McClure and Clarke believed the Lord’s Acre plan would produce ample spiritual benefits for its participants.

The two leaders regularly claimed that the religious aspects of the movement were just as if not more important than the financial benefits. “When we started with the Farmers

Federation,” McClure told a public audience in 1947, “we felt that there would be very little use in improving material conditions unless we improved spiritual conditions at the same time. So we decided that we would do what we could to develop the spiritual side of things in the mountains…. I think that if we had nothing but the Lord’s Acre movement, it would have been worth every penny that has been spent!”93

Pastors and proponents across the country agreed that the spiritual side of the plan was in many cases its most compelling aspect. R.G. Melton, pastor of Bethany and

Campfield Memorial Baptist Churches (Rutherford County, NC) as well as Camp Creek

Baptist Church (Cleveland County, NC), believed strongly that the Lord’s Acre had increased the spiritual vitality of his congregations. “Since the Lord’s Acre work started in our church,” he wrote, “we have been really recognizing the presence of the Spirit of the Lord. In our last revival meeting more souls were saved and more joined the church than at any one time in at least ten years.”94 H.C. Weber of the Stewardship Council of

92 J. Kelly Unger, letter reprinted from Presbyterian Survey, FFN 15:4 (Dec 1934), 23. 93 Typescript, proceedings of Farmers’ Federation Picnic, New York City Waldorf-Astoria, Nov 17, 1947, 13-14. McClure Family Papers Box 4, B.1.b.2.g., SAA. 94 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 18:8 (April 1938), 15. 164 the United States and Canada declared that the Lord’s Acre was “a sort of core in the stewardship movement,” and at “the centre of the regirding of the Christian community for the next great battle of the Faith.”95

Indeed, the spiritual benefits of the Lord’s Acre were so valued that the plan was put into action in places where financial help was not needed. Participants agreed with

Clarke and McClure that the plan’s spiritual benefits were of the highest importance. “We faced no financial problems—particularly none of any magnitude,” claimed Rev. Fletcher

Nelson of Gilboa Methodist Episcopal Church in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. “We did not need to include the Lord’s Acre plan in our program of church activity for any financial returns it might produce. But we did need it….” His congregants agreed: “It did more to convince me I am God’s steward than all the preaching I have heard for half a century,” said one member of the church. “The fellowship of a common task was inspiring,” agreed another.96 William G. Klein of Berea, Kentucky, wrote that “even if

[a] church raised no more money, I would believe in the spiritual values….The Lord’s

Acre plan is one way in which we can try to make farming a Christian way of life, and I favor it entirely apart from any value it has in a financial way.”97

Spiritual Benefits: Living Biblically

As its devotees saw it, the inspiration for the Lord’s Acre lay ultimately in biblical tradition, and one of the greatest spiritual benefits of participating in the project was the ability to live according to that tradition. Devoting part of one’s produce was akin to tithing, and tithing was a clear biblical obligation; Malachi 3:10, for instance, instructs,

95 H.C. Weber, “The Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 17:7 (March 1937), 23. 96 Letter from Rev. Fletcher Nelson, FFN 15:6 (Feb 1935), 11. 97 “The Lord’s Acre Plan” book of questionnaires #2 [1943], Ralph Felton Papers Box 1, DUA. 165

“Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse.” But McClure and Clarke found greater inspiration in the ancient festival of the firstfruits, Shavuot. Describing the feast, Exodus

34:26 says, “The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the

LORD thy God.” It was an injunction repeated in Proverbs 3:9: “Honor the Lord with thy substance and with the first fruits of all thine increase.”

McClure and Clarke saw in these verses the ultimate origin of the Lord’s Acre, and they included them in brochures and on Lord’s Acre materials given out to participants.98 Where Israelites would have brought their products to the Temple in

Jerusalem during Shavuot, Lord’s Acre participants would bring their products to their local church. Yet in both instances a ceremony of “ingathering” would be held—a ceremony very similar to the Harvest Home Sunday holiday examined in the previous chapter.

The Federation exhorted churches to hold these ingathering ceremonies in the fall to celebrate the harvest. Secularized autumn festivals were not enough to focus attention on the agricultural harvest; the Federation, like proponents of Harvest Home Sunday, emphasized that “our national Thanksgiving day, even when observed in churches, centers mainly upon the remembrance of national blessings, with only partial emphasis upon the harvest.”99 Ingathering, by contrast, was a ceremony to give thanks specifically for agricultural plenty and the communities that prospered from that productivity.

At an ingathering service, the proceeds from the Lord’s Acre projects of that year, or in some cases, the products themselves, would be brought ceremoniously into the

98 All the mentioned verses can be seen, for example, in “The Lord’s Acre Record”; “The Lord’s Acre Calendar”; and “Bible Practices for Christian Progress,” all in Lord’s Acre scrapbook, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.1., SAA. 99 “Harvest Thanksgiving & Ingathering” pamphlet, Lord’s Acre scrapbook, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.1., SAA. 166 church (see Figure 3). Clarke suggested having children hold “placards spelling out

Thanksgiving” while the young adults could “march forward with stalks of corn, bundles of grain, and baskets of varied fruits and vegetables, and stand on either side of the pulpit, while the prayer of Thanks-giving is being offered.”100 When the offerings from the projects were brought forward, they could be placed in a special container that could be made, Clarke suggested, of branches and leaves, and decorated with vegetables. The church should be decorated “with the fruits of the harvest,” and the ceremony could include children’s pageants and other activities that would center attention on agriculture.101

Whether children participated in this way or not, the Federation suggested that ingathering celebrations be deeply biblical in character. Federation pamphlets carried lists of biblical verses relating to the harvest (or to the springtime if churches wanted to have ceremonies for the planting season), and to the virtues that participating in the Lord’s

Acre would help instill. Some characteristic verses were Psalm 65:13 (“The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered over with corn; they shout for joy, they also sing”), Matthew 9:37-38 (“the harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest”), and 2 Timothy 2:15 (“Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth”).102

The Harvest Festival and Lord’s Acre Ingathering held jointly by St. Paul’s UCC

(Silver Creek, WI) and St. John’s UCC (Boltonville, WI), in October 1948, offers a good

100 Dumont Clarke, “Suggestions for a Harvest Thanks-giving and Ingathering Service—II,” FFN 33:2 (Oct 1952), 19. 101 “Harvest Thanksgiving & Ingathering” pamphlet, Lord’s Acre scrapbook, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.1., SAA. 102 ibid. 167

Figure 3: Lord's Acre Sunday at Sulphur Springs Baptist Church, Rutherford, North Carolina, November 16, 1952. Photograph 82-10-461, James G.K. McClure Family Papers, Southern Appalachian Archives, Mars Hill College, Mars Hill, North Carolina. 168 example of how churches followed the Federation’s suggestions.103 The festival began with a responsorial recitation of the opening of Psalm 100: “[Minister:] O be joyful in the

Lord, all ye lands: / [People:] Serve the Lord with gladness; come before his presence with singing. / [M:] Know ye that the Lord, he is God: / [P:] It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; / [M:] We are his people / [P:] And the sheep of his pasture.” Then the pastor’s opening prayer announced that “We bless Thee that Thou hast crowned the year with Thy goodness and has bestowed upon us the kindly fruits of the earth.”

After singing hymns and hearing a sermon on Deuteronomy 8 (which chapter describes the provenance of God and the need to thank God for material success on earth), the congregation began the dedication of the Lord’s Acre offerings. This portion of the service began with a tripartite litany of thanks, penitence, and imprecation—one that reflected both admiration for agriculture and recognition of human errors both social and environmental. After statements of the good things that God had provided, including

“life-filled seed and sacred earth,” “fertile fields which fill our barns and bins,” and “love that blossoms all our lives,” the people responded, “We give Thee thanks, O God.” After the minister’s statements of collective sins, however—including “We have wasted the holy earth, taken life from the soil, never to return it,” and “We have forgotten our children, our neighbors, and our children’s children in our thoughtless greed”—the people responded, “Forgive us, dear Lord, we pray.”

The litany at the Wisconsin festival ended with Rev. Melvin Schroer reciting,

“That we may be good stewards of all these Thy blessings, and that we may so share our

103 The description in the following paragraphs, through the hymn text, is taken from “Harvest Festival and Lord’s Acre Ingathering” program, Lord’s Acre scrapbook, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.1., SAA. The churches are now collectively known as New Horizon UCC (http://www.newhorizonucc.org/p/how- three-churches-became-one.html). The music for the hymn can be heard on “The Story of the Lord’s Acre Movement,” side 1, 11:53-13:21, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.2, SAA. 169 bounty with those in need across the world as to cause all lands to break forth into the songs of thanksgiving,” and the people responding, “We beseech Thee to help us, O

God.” After the litany, the congregation stood while the offerings were brought forward.

They sang a doxology to the Trinity, and Rev. Schroer offered a prayer of thanksgiving.

Then the congregation sang the “Lord’s Acre Hymn,” which was written by Dumont

Clarke and circulated to member churches. The hymn went:

We care for our Lord’s acres, and think of Jesus’ way; His goodness and his purpose Inspire us day by day. We dedicate these acres, Like fields the Master trod, And join with one another In willing work with God.

So, serving well our church life, A holy joy we find, With hands and hearts advancing Christ’s mission to mankind. And we who do in reverence The tasks God daily sends, Grow kindly, just and helpful, As neighbors and his friends.

In Jesus’ spirit growing, Our lives, like ripening fields, Increase in fruitful service To bring God’s harvest yields; And as the years pass over, Like springs that never cease, The heavenly Father’s blessings Give cheerfulness and peace.

Thus be our daily labor Beneath the open sky; It makes the farm life sacred, and God is ever nigh. Our acres, consecrated, Bless us who work thereon; Our country church grows stronger 170

To lead Christ’s Kingdom on. Amen.

Spiritual Benefits: Communal Participation

Another central spiritual benefit of the plan was its ability to bring the full community into participation in the church. With the Lord’s Acre plan, everyone had his or her task to contribute. “At the beginning of the Lord’s Acre Movement,” acknowledged Clarke, “some churches used the plan primarily because it presented a fresh and unusual method of increasing church support. Through the years, however, the plan has been increasingly recognized as being fundamental to the stewardship activities of the rural church. It definitely tends to unite stewardship, day by day, with the work of the farm and the home.”104

Through the Lord’s Acre plan, even children could become active participants in the stewardship of their churches. Eight-year-old Virginia Dean Sams of Piney Mountain

Baptist Church in Stocksville, North Carolina, wrote to Clarke in 1937 about the chickens she had raised: “Last year I raised twelve very nice chickens. I sold them in the fall receiving $4.00. This year I have the same number. I don’t know how much I will get for them this year....I like all my chickens, though I give my Lord’s Acre chickens my special attention, because I want all the money I can get for the church. I enjoy working for the Lord, so I will be one of His servants.”105 Young Alice Petersen of Mills River

Presbyterian Church started the program by raising chickens, and when she was four she dedicated a calf to the Lord’s Acre. When she was five she raised a flock of ducks (see

104 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 29:5 (Jan 1949), 15. 105 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 18:3 (Nov 1937), 15. 171

Figure 4), and in the following year she began to raise a 200-pound pig which eventually brought $18 at market.106

Edgar A. Lance, a member of Alice’s congregation, claimed that giving children

Lord’s Acre projects of their own would teach them how it is that churches can exist in the first place. “Without the Lord’s Acre plan,” he wrote, “the children in a home don’t realize how the church contribution comes. They don’t realize the cost. With the projects, however, they feel they are earning it themselves; and they enjoy so much turning in the money themselves.”107 Rev. Dr. C.B. Williams, pastor of Pisgah Associate Reformed

Presbyterian Church in Gastonia, NC, offered additional testimony of the inclusivity of the Lord’s Acre plan. He wrote to the Federation about one of his congregants, a fourteen-year-old boy named Billy Thomas, who had a severe spinal condition and was unable to stand or walk. Billy wanted so badly to participate in the Lord’s Acre, according to Rev. Williams, that “he constituted himself the shoeshiner for the family. He was always ready to shine shoes at any call. The day before Thanksgiving when the other boys were making their returns, he handed in $3.50 as his Lord’s Acre gift. Not so much in actual money, but great in the spirit of service, and an inspiration to others!”108

Spiritual Benefits: Christian Character

Children were central to the Lord’s Acre vision not only because they could play a part now, but also because bringing up children with a sense of spiritual duty would contribute to the growth of Christianity throughout the country and beyond. McClure and

106 Caption on photograph 82-10-2624, McClure Family Papers, Photograph Box 11, SAA; Jo Chamberlin, “Harvesting the Lord’s Acre,” Reader’s Digest, April 1941, 121-124. 107 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 19:7 (March 1939), 23. 108 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 20:3 (Nov. 1939), 15. 172

Figure 4: Alice Petersen of Mills River, North Carolina, with her Lord's Acre ducks. Photograph 82-10- 2624, James G.K. McClure Family Papers, Southern Appalachian Archives, Mars Hill College, Mars Hill, North Carolina. 173

Clarke regularly spoke about the necessity of having “Christian character.” They believed that participating in the Lord’s Acre was one of the best ways to build that Christian character. Unlike the cliché about unpleasant activities that “build character,” however,

McClure and Clarke believed that cultivating the self through the Lord’s Acre would be neither unpleasant nor onerous, but rather joyful. And character was not simply self- serving; there was much at stake. At a 1941 picnic-style meeting in New York with prominent business leaders, McClure stated, “The country church is the one thing in the countryside that concentrates on teaching Christian character, and we all know that civilization does not last any time unless it is based on Christian character.”109

Pastors agreed. Rev. Charles B. Trammel, pastor of Columbus and Mill Spring

(NC) Baptist Churches, believed that the Lord’s Acre was the best method available for teaching Christian character. “The churches have depended too long upon preaching and teaching alone to develop Christian character,” he explained. “I seriously doubt that the traits of character in the New Testament, such as; love, truthfulness, kindness, hospitality, temperance, industry, mercy, hopefulness, honesty, forgiveness, humility, joyfulness, thankfulness, perseverance, spirituality, respectfulness and self-control can be taught directly as reading, arithmetic, spelling and writing.” Traditional pedagogy would not make a child Christian. Instead, living the gospel values and putting them into practice would inculcate the spiritual virtues. Trammel believed that Lord’s Acre projects, which required ample planning, careful decision-making and proper execution, were in keeping with New Testament teachings about work, including Luke 14:28 (“For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have

109 “Business and Social Leaders Enjoy a North Carolina ‘Picnic,’” Business Machines Jan 16, 1941, 6. McClure Family Papers Box 4, B.1.b.2.d, SAA. 174 sufficient to finish it?”) and 2 Corinthians 9:7 (“Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver”).110

Spiritual virtues and Christian character were necessary, according to Clarke, because there were so many dangerous corrupting influences in the world. “In no other period of history,” Clarke maintained, “have there been so many pressing forces of evil, such as coarse magazines and books, vulgarizing movies, improperly controlled relationships, gambling and drink. Never perhaps has there been such a need for ever- present spiritual forces for guidance and control, for a daily help to enable us to fulfill St.

Paul’s injunction, ‘Be not overcome of evil but overcome evil with good.’”111 In addition to popular culture and dangerous addictions, Clarke blamed a litany of “insistent worldly interests” that distracted Christians from their true duties: interests that included vacations, parties, and easily consumable recreation, in addition to science and secularism, which had destabilizing effects on Christian character. Ultimately, in Clarke’s view, “love of things has for many people largely displaced the love of God.”112

Combatting these spiritual dangers took an increasingly central place in the

Federation’s work. Clarke began to develop additional character-building methods that could be employed alongside manual labor in the Lord’s Acre. By the late 1930s, Clarke had developed a technique he called “Scripture-prayer,” which would utilize the words of the Bible as aids to developing a positive and healthy Christian psychology.

110 Charles B. Trammel, “The Project Method in Religious Education,” FFN 13:6 (Feb 1933), 11. Bible translations from KJV. 111 Dumont Clarke, “The Contribution of the Lord’s Acre Movement to the Country Church,” FFN 18:6 (Feb., 1938), 3. 112 Dumont Clarke, “New Forces in the Country Church: Why the Lord’s Acre Plan and Scripture-Prayer are Needed,” FFN 19:6 (Feb 1939), 5, 12. 175

This method of prayer was based around memorizing verses of scripture that a person saw as particularly relevant to their needs. They could then be recited,

“prayerfully, daily, in connection with the Lord’s Acre project.” Doing so would not only turn a person’s mind back to scriptural teachings, but would give worshippers assurance of God’s closeness. “The words of the Bible, with their divine inspiration and their familiarity to mind and heart, help at once to make real the presence of God as well as to express the thought of the prayer,” wrote Clarke. “Moreover they are words which have brought vision of God and spiritual power to countless millions of worshippers through the centuries.”113

Clarke recommended that Scripture-prayer be adopted not only by individuals as they worked in the fields, but by communities and classes as well. Schoolteachers and principals, he suggested, should start each day by leading children in Bible verses. In

1938 he suggested Psalm 121:1-2 (“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help; my help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth”) and

Psalm 51:10 (“Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me”) as good places to start. Church congregations could assign a monthly verse, and members could recite it together at the beginning of worship each week, “thus strengthening fellowship in worship.”114 But whatever the setting, scripture verses should “never [be] said carelessly or by rote, but always thoughtfully, reverently, impressively, befitting the

Word of God.”115

113 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 18:11 (July 1938), 15. 114 “Bible Practices for Christian Progress,” 3, Lord’s Acre scrapbook, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.1., SAA 115 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 19:2 (Oct 1938), 15. 176

Clarke acknowledged that, like the Lord’s Acre itself, scripture-prayer had biblical roots. In his view, scripture-prayer came out of the ancient Israelite tradition of daily reciting the Shema, a prayer based around Deut. 6:4 (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our

God is one”). He pointed also to the longstanding practice of reciting the Psalms (which formed the basis of the Catholic Divine Office said daily by all clergy and religious).

Scripture-prayer, like these practices but more suitable for modern Protestants, “enables one readily to speak to God, and fills the whole mind and heart with familiar, life-giving words of Holy Writ….[it] serve[s] to nurture the habits of prayer, the study of God’s

Word, and the practice of stewardship in the midst of active daily life.”116

Spiritual Benefits: Partnerships with God

Finally, participation in the Lord’s Acre plan could engender a spirit of reverence for the land itself, and the duty that humans had to take care of the earth. The plan did so generally by encouraging participants to see themselves as partners with God. Working on the farm was a way of participating in creation, working alongside God as it were to bring new life and growth into the world.

According to the Rev. H.B. Dendy of Dillingham Presbyterian Church, for example, “The Lord’s Acre Movement recognizes God’s ownership and man’s stewardship.” Dendy praised the movement for its ability to teach individuals how to steward God’s creation. “The land belongs to God, the sunshine and rain come directly from His benevolent hands. Man belongs to God, all our faculties and capacities come to us only as He gives them; the principles of life in the seed and growth in the plant are His

116 Dumont Clarke, “New Forces in the Country Church: Why the Lord’s Acre Plan and Scripture-Prayer are Needed,” FFN 19:6 (Feb 1939), 12. See also “Bible Practices for Christian Progress,” 3, Lord’s Acre scrapbook, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.1., SAA. 177 creation and continue by His Providential care.” Working as a farmer to nurture that growth, particularly through dedicated work on behalf of the church, would teach individual Christians about the responsibility they bore toward the land itself.117

This sense of partnership was often palpable. J. Claude Sales of Fletcher

Methodist Church claimed that “the most wonderful thing about the Lord’s Acre plan is the feeling of being partners with God. It is a feeling that lifts one to a high and holy place.”118 Rev. Eldon Durham of White Rock Presbyterian Church composed a Lord’s

Acre prayer that began, “Almighty God, the Creator and Father of us all, unto Thee we would give all glory. For the earth is thine and the fullness thereof. By much pretense have we claimed that by our own strength we have gained dominion over the works of thy hand. We have wasted thy gifts, trading fertile fields for desert places….Grant us, we pray Thee, to see that in our fields and barns, our crops and flocks, our minds, strength, time, and all that which we call our own we are but partners with Thee. Grant us also, through the dedication of a Lord’s Acre in which we set aside some portion of the fruit of this partnership to be returned to Thee, that we may be quickened in body and spirit to a closer fellowship with Thee.”119

The Federation, drawing upon the language of Protestant agrarianism stretching back to Liberty Hyde Bailey, saw the earth and all creation as intrinsically holy. In 1935

Clarke described Bailey’s vision as “the ideal relationship between man and the earth.”120

In 1941, Clarke described the complexity and vastness of nature as “manifestations of the mind and purposes and providence of God.” Nature was there to teach human beings a

117 H.B. Dendy, “The Story of a New Church Building,” FFN 15:12 (August 1935), 41. 118 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 13:7 (March 1933), n.p. 119 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 27:8 (April 1947), 27. 120 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 16:1 (Sept 1935), 15. 178 lesson about God. “Only as man regards the earth as God’s holy earth, and the creatures of the earth as God’s creatures, to be wisely and faithfully used in order that both present and future generations may have the largest yield—only so can man learn from nature the great lessons for life that God would have us learn.” The emphasis on “yield” was perhaps more instrumentalist than some Protestant agrarians might have been comfortable with, but the emphasis on the earth’s holiness was the same.121

Official publications of the Farmers Federation rarely spoke directly about the consequences of poor stewardship—soil loss and environmental degradation—but individual churches and denominations that used the Lord’s Acre often emphasized the importance of the earth and the ways in which people had sinned against the creation.

They widely believed that one of the best benefits of the Lord’s Acre was the way it taught participants to respect the earth. The pastor of Thanksgiving Church in Johnston

County, NC, for instance, whose church participated in the plan, regularly exhorted

“every farmer to be a good steward of the soil—to use crop rotation and cover crops and practice modern methods with livestock and crops.”122 Rev. Richard E. Hamblin of Blue

Ridge Methodist Circuit in Virginia agreed that “the Lord’s Acre teaches stewardship of natural resources, of time, and of fellowship.”123 In its suggested program for a Lord’s

Acre Harvest Festival Service, the Seventh Day Baptist Christian Rural Fellowship of

Brookfield, NY, included a prayer to be recited in unison by a congregation: “We come confessing unto Thee, O God, our guilt for the wrong uses of the soil; for the selfish handling of plants grown from it; and, for the careless attitude toward many of the

121 Dumont Clarke, “God’s Revelation of Himself in Nature,” FFN 21:11 (July 1941), 15. 122 Betsy Seymour, “Thanksgiving Church Did It: Maybe Your Church Could,” Progressive Farmer (Carolinas-Virginia Edition) 65:11 (Nov 1950), 70, 79, quote on 79. 123 Quoted in James W. Sells, “A Lord’s Acre Program is One Way A Small Church Can Prosper,” Progressive Farmer (Carolinas-Virginia Edition) 70:2 (Feb 1955), 86A-B. 179 blessings Thou hast given. In this our sin is not only against the land but also against the fellowship of those who exist by the blessings Thou hast given from the soil.” Later in the service, individual readers recited verses from Genesis and the Psalms, with one of them stating, “The soil is holy earth. All that we eat and wear comes from it; and without the life therein man would soon perish. We give thanks for the earth and its life giving bounty.”124

Building the Kingdom

Any growth of the Lord’s Acre plan and the scripture-prayer technique was ultimately not simply about bringing individual churches into prosperity but about bringing forth the church, the kingdom of God. Clarke and McClure were clear that their goal was to make the United States a Christian nation, and in so doing a beacon for the spread of Christianity around the world.

In 1940, with war raging in Europe, and the United States’s role still uncertain,

Clarke emphasized the differences between Christian triumph and the political and military forces of the secular world. “The campaign of the churches carried on under the sign and symbol of Christ is not for any domination of the earth,” he assured readers, “but for bringing about the dominion of God on earth. It is not for a world controlled by outward forces, but for a world in which the Spirit of Christ shall increasingly prevail within the hearts of men….With the spirit and habit of prayer strengthened, with concerted effort under the direction of the Great Leader, increasingly will the people of

124 S.D.B. Christian Rural Fellowship, “An Order for a Harvest Festival Service” pamphlet, 1948, Lord’s Acre scrapbook, McClure Family Papers, Box 4, B.1.c.1., SAA. 180 the country churches unite earnestly in the prayer of the Lord, ‘Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on Earth.’”125

Similarly, McClure had long been opposed to war. When he read The Conquest of

War, published at the height of World War I by his contemporary Norman Thomas (a fellow Presbyterian minister and eventual presidential candidate for the Socialist Party),

McClure evidently agreed strongly with Thomas’s pacifist language. He underlined with a heavy hand Thomas’s indictment of the Armenian genocide—“this last and most terrible of Turkish crimes has not been prevented but made possible by war”—and two pages later scribbled in the margins, “military cooperation + democracy is artificial not voluntary.”126

Nevertheless, Dumont Clarke at least was not afraid to use martial language in a

Christian context when talking about the urgency of building the kingdom: “It is the summons to the churches to endeavor to enlist everyone who can be reached, in sacrificial work for His Cause, to have each one heed Christ’s command, ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.’….It is of the utmost importance to enlist the children from the earliest years in work for God.

It must be done.”127 Clarke went so far as to call this “the army of the Lord assembled in

His churches.”128 Clarke revived the longstanding Christian trope of the soldier for God in order to undermine the very real danger that actual soldiers posed to the world at large.

125 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 20:11 (July 1940), 11. 126 McClure, notes in personal copy of Norman M. Thomas et al., The Conquest of War (Friendship Press 1917). McClure Family Papers Box 1, A.9. SAA. 127 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 22:12 (Aug 1942), 55, emphases in original. 128 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 21:6 (Feb 1941), 15. 181

But Clarke and McClure could not support actual combat, and did not believe that

American soldiers were fighting a war for Christianity.

Though soldiers for the army of the Lord might be found all over the world, the

United States nevertheless best represented the nature of the kingdom of God. In an unstable world, McClure especially wanted Federation members to know that they lived in the best of all possible nations. “Our American way of life, representative government, is worth fighting for with all the strength and ability that we have,” wrote McClure in

September 1940. “We must not only fight to defend it, but we must fight the encroachment of all dictatorial powers which eventually rob the common people of all that they possess.”129

It was the freedom that inhered in the United States that made it so compelling to

McClure. The “secret of America,” in his words, was that “the founding fathers tried to set up a government which would set free the individual to develop without limit.” But

McClure presented this idea in a way that would sound intuitively familiar to very many conservative American Christians today: he attributed constitutional freedom not to classical liberalism but to the influence of Christianity. “So we must never forget for a moment,” he stated, “that the source of our strength is these Christian ideas—the

Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man. In other words, the source of our national strength is the spiritual foundation of our individual lives.”130 The United States at its full potential was a nation based on Christian principles, according to McClure.

The alternative was exploitation, coercion, and occupation, after the fashion of

Nazi Germany and Japan. “The world is looking to America for leadership,” McClure

129 James G.K. McClure, “Is Democracy Worth Fighting For?” FFN 21:1 (Sep 1940), 4. 130 James G.K. McClure, “News from the Front,” FFN 31:8 (April 1951), 3. 182 said in a speech during the war. “America alone among the nations of the earth was founded on ideals and ideals which promised to every man a chance….Our beginnings as a nation and our whole history have prepared us for leading the world into a new day.”131

Clarke agreed. At a speech at McDowell High School in Marion, NC, in 1940, he stated,

“The only way to oppose Hitler’s diabolical purpose is to develop a counteracting

Christian purpose in this country.” That Christian leadership would come from the United

States, and especially through the leadership of country churches.132

As they watched the movement grow overseas, Lord’s Acre participants agreed that forming connections between nations for the sake of the Kingdom was of paramount importance. In the early 1950s, Sanford Wills, a high school student from southern

Georgia, was inspired through his work in his church’s Lord’s Acre plan to attend college and train to become an overseas missionary.133 One church in Sidney Center, New York, nestled in the upper Catskills, realized in 1949 that their Lord’s Acre work was only producing results for their own congregation. “The circle of implication somehow seemed incomplete,” explained their pastor, Rev. Wilfred Lyon. “The question arose:

‘Why not use the things brought to send someone out as a Lord’s Acher; someone whose heart could ache for God’s people; who could not rest until his strength had been thrown into the battle against prejudice and hate?’” One of the church’s choir members, a girl of eighteen, volunteered to travel to a Waldensian community in northern Italy that was building a youth camp in the mountains. “This young lady worked with a pick and shovel

131 James G.K. McClure, “The Springs of Democracy,” 18. McClure Family Papers Box 1, A.17. SAA. The typescript of this speech, given to something called the “Pen and Plate Club,” is undated, but clearly written during World War II. 132 “Lord’s Acre is Emphasized in Picnic Speech,” Asheville Citizen (Aug. 7, 1940), clipping in 1940 newspaper clipping scrapbook, McClure Family Papers Box 6, B.2.b.1.a.3. SAA. 133 James W. Sells, “By-Products of the Lord’s Acre,” Progressive Farmer (Carolinas-Virginia Edition) 69:4 (April 1954), 60-61. 183 and wheel barrow for ten weeks,” reported Rev. Lyon, “but she shared a new insight concerning American Christian youth with the Italian people. By working ten hours a day and subsisting on a starch diet, she brought an entirely new understanding to Italy and brought from there a deeper commitment to the things of the Spirit. This Lord’s Acher project in a person raised a whole new crop of mutual affection between two nations which otherwise would have remained ungerminated.” The agricultural metaphors could not have been accidental. Devotion to the Lord’s Acre movement could foster international understanding on a personal basis in addition to an institutional or organizational one.134

Although Clarke, like McClure, saw the United States as the world’s moral exemplar and the ground from which the kingdom of God would sprout, he nevertheless emphasized that the kingdom itself was bigger than any one nation. He wanted, he said, to spread “a larger vision of the potentiality of the Church-Universal for overcoming evil and for bringing brotherhood and peace in the world.” The church at large could be more effective than individual nations, and it would be effective not by relying on traditional preaching but by inspiring individuals and communities to live Christian lives on the ground. “Indeed on every hand the sights and sounds will be seen and known of the advancement of the Kingdom of God on earth.”135 The kingdom would always be built from the bottom up. As World War II drew the United States out of its long-standing isolationism, expectations for international cooperation led Clarke to affirm that

Christianizing the people would be the best route toward harmonious politics. Individual communities, he stated, “must be the seed bed of democracy. Therefore, the

134 “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 30:10 (June 1950), 19. 135 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 20:9 (May 1940), 15. 184

Christianizing of the local community should more and more be made the concern of the church.”136

Despite Clarke’s and McClure’s tendency to see World War II in spiritual terms, they deplored the violence and killing going on in Europe and Asia. In the same way, concerned about the sustained armament after the conclusion of World War II, and the growing brinksmanship between the United States and the Soviet Union, Clarke reminded Farmers Federation members that the Cold War was not a Christian war: “It is certain that the only way finally to prevent war is to strengthen the forces of Christian good will,” he wrote. “Christian good will, prayerfully, understandingly, persistently manifested by millions of our people, can and will be used by God to ‘remove mountains’ of hatred and distrust.”137 Clarke, and McClure alongside him, disagreed with the

Niehburian compromises that many mainline Protestants would come to make during the

Cold War. For them there was no choosing the lesser of two evils; there was only a singleminded dedication to the task of living the proper Christian life, and radiating that spirituality out into the rest of the world. As McClure put it, “The big job of all of us here in America is to develop the spiritual equivalent of the atomic bomb. That means that the big job right now is to develop spiritual power which will control the tremendous powers of selfishness and destruction which have been let loose in the world.”138 Both Clarke and

McClure deplored the new reality of atomic weapons and total war, and could not countenance cooperation with the institutions that created them. For them, peace and security would always be built through the church, one person at a time.

136 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 23:12 (Aug 1943), 55. 137 Dumont Clarke, “The Country Church with the Lord’s Acre Plan,” FFN 27:9 (May 1947), 23. 138 James G.K. McClure, “News from the Front: The Spiritual Equivalent of the Atomic Bomb,” FFN 28:1 (Sept, 1947), 4. 185

Building peace meant engaging in what Clarke called “sacrificial stewardship.” A church that practiced sacrificial stewardship was a “witnessing, missionary church.” It was also one that remembered the great privileges that Americans enjoyed. “We are the most favored people of the world in respect to the Four Freedoms,” Clarke wrote in April of 1951, citing the core liberties President Roosevelt had laid out a decade previously: freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of speech, and freedom of worship.

“Because we are thus favored, our responsibility to the world is great.” In addition to the burden of living up to these privileges, Americans also had a responsibility to those servicemen fighting communism in Korea. “The casualty list is high,” he wrote; “we can only repay them through a sacrificial stewardship of our talents, our resources, our dedicated lives.” Not surprisingly, the Lord’s Acre plan remained one of the best forms of sacrificial stewardship. Even twenty-one years after the Federation had adopted responsibility for overseeing the plan, Clarke’s sense of urgency was palpable. “The dedicated project plan…is an effective means for training in tithing and it can unite all, young and old, in the attainment of special Christian objectives. Surely a great obligation rests upon the people of our country churches to adopt, or to go forward with this basic

Biblical principle. This year. Now.”139

Passing the Torch

When Dumont Clarke prepared to retire in the fall of 1956, the Federation was faced with the challenge not only of finding a successor, but also of finding the funds to pay that successor. Since his arrival in North Carolina, Clarke had refused to take a salary for his Lord’s Acre work—the Federation had only paid the cost of his travel and other

139 Dumont Clarke, “Sacrificial Stewardship is Required of All,” FFN 31:8 (April 1951), 15. 186 business expenses. McClure was able in 1955 to secure an endowment of $200,000 to pay the salary of Clarke’s replacement, Rev. Jack Waldrep.140 In 1959, Clarke was honored with a Citation for Distinguished Service from Agricultural Missions, Inc., for his work on the Lord’s Acre movement. At the ceremony the biblical inspiration for the plan, as well as its relationship to the earth, was again emphasized: “The Lord’s Acre plan helps people understand the full meaning of the Psalmist when he said, ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.’”141

The Federation itself was sold in 1959, and eventually dissolved in 1963, although the Educational and Development Fund continued in a separate existence. The Fund continued to employ Waldrep to oversee the Lord’s Acre plan.142 Waldrep maintained the busy schedule of his predecessor. During 1961 and 1962 Waldrep visited over 100 church groups in twelve states across the US, and visited conferences in locations from Maine to

Texas.

Waldrep traveled internationally as well. In February and March of 1962, for instance, he made a trip to the Middle East and Africa, where he visited with 145 different church groups from 22 different denominations in nine different countries.

Thirty-five of the churches that he visited instituted Lord’s Acre projects while he was there, and of course it is possible that others may have started after he left.143 In subsequent years, Waldrep made further promotional trips, including to Iraq, Iran, India,

140 Twenty-Ninth Annual Report of the Educational and Development Fund of the Farmers Federation (1956), 9. McClure Family Papers, Box 3, B.1.a.3., SAA. 141 Citations for Distinguished Service, May 28, 1959, Agricultural Missions, Inc., Ralph Felton Papers Box 1, DUA. 142 Ager, We Plow God’s Fields, 470-75. 143 Educational and Development Fund Report of Expenditures July 1, 1961 to June 30, 1962, 1. McClure Family Papers, Box 3, B.1.a.3., SAA. 187

Pakistan, the Philippines, and Korea.144 The Lord’s Acre left a lasting effect on African churches. Soon after Waldrep’s visit, the Federation reported that Quaker missionaries were overseeing almost 500 Lord’s Acre projects among the people “in one small area of

Kenya” alone.145

Conclusion

The Lord’s Acre was, by financial reckoning alone, a tremendous success. By

1969, estimates of the total annual productivity of all Lord’s Acre projects in the United

States were placed at around $7.5 million.146 By 1971 that estimate had risen to over $12 million annually.147 The intangible spiritual benefits of the plan to its participants are naturally more difficult to measure, yet the degree to which the movement spread around the United States and the world suggests that many people embraced and believed in its potential.

Yet by the end of the 1970s, the Lord’s Acre plan as it had been practiced seems to have largely evaporated. By 1978 the Educational and Development Fund that had long overseen the plan was no longer spending money on the Lord’s Acre, but was focused instead only on providing financial assistance to individuals studying for the

144 Educational and Development Fund Annual Report 1963-64, 4. McClure Family Papers, Box 3, B.1.a.3., SAA. 145 Educational and Development Fund Report for the Year 1962, 4. McClure Family Papers, Box 3, B.1.a.3., SAA. 146 Educational and Development Fund Annual Report 1968-69, 2. McClure Family Papers, Box 3, B.1.a.3., SAA. 147 Educational and Development Fund Annual Report 1970-71, 2. McClure Family Papers, Box 3, B.1.a.3., SAA. 188 rural ministry, or adding to their education through special programs. In 1982, for instance, “modest assistance” was given to nine pastors.148

The enthusiasm over the Lord’s Acre and rural churches was evidently quite suddenly gone, although there is no available evidence for why and how the movement declined during the 1970s.149 John Ager declares that by the early 1970s “there was no longer a need in Western North Carolina for those methods of raising cash and morale.”150 But the Lord’s Acre had long since ceased to be a specifically Carolinian movement. Nor was the country as a whole in a particularly strong economic position in the mid-1970s. Still, the nation’s circumstances were much different in the 1970s than they had been in 1930. Whatever the reason, though, it had proven itself to be an integral part of rural American Christianity for over forty years.

Of course, the fact that the Educational and Development Fund was no longer assisting with and overseeing churches who used the plan did not mean that individual churches necessarily stopped carrying out the plan on their own. As noted at the beginning of the chapter, many churches continue versions of the trend to this day.

Fayette Congregational Church in Fayette, Michigan, for instance, has held a Lord’s Acre sale every year since the end of World War II. Today, however, the church primarily sells handcrafts made by its members instead of farm produce.151

The Lord’s Acre began in a period of uncertainty and struggle for rural communities and churches alike. It harnessed spiritual energy and determination, as well

148 Educational and Development Fund Annual Report 1980-81, 1. McClure Family Papers, Box 3, B.1.a.3., SAA. 149 The McClure Family Papers at SAA do not include copies of the Fund’s annual reports from 1973-1977, which might shed light on the end of the movement 150 Ager, We Plow God’s Fields, 475. 151 “66th Annual ‘Lord’s Acre Auction,’” Daily Press (Escanaba, MI), Sep. 25, 2012, http://www.dailypress.net/page/content.detail/id/538494/66th-annual--Lord-s-Acre-Auction- .html?nav=5120 (accessed November 29, 2012). 189 as financial pragmatism, to generate stability for rural churches. In doing so, however, it looked outward to the world. The Kingdom of God could be built, according to the movement’s leaders, by retaining small farmers in small communities and small churches. The leadership for a new, more moral America, would emerge from the countryside.

This was the embodiment of the Protestant agrarian message, and its execution was far more successful than any of the previous projects that reformers tried. Though today’s Lord’s Acre may not look quite like McClure’s vision, churches around the country nevertheless keep the spirit of the Lord’s Acre alive. The Lord’s Acre continues to provide not only financial gifts but also fellowship and community, and to keep the agrarian message about face-to-face relationships alive. 190

Chapter 4

The Gospel of the Soil: Soil Conservation, Stewardship, and Christian Environmentalism, 1930-1970

For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else. - Isaiah 45:18 (KJV)

The previous chapters have examined multiple active strategies for revitalizing and supporting rural churches and rural communities. This chapter examines in more detail the philosophical structure of Protestant agrarianism. Beneath the agrarian ideals of the holy earth and the abundant life lay the idea of environmental stewardship—the idea that people are called upon to act as respectful caretakers for the earth. Protestant agrarians developed the idea of stewardship as a counterbalance to the idea that humans had a right to “replenish the earth, and subdue it” (Gn 1:28, KJV). By calling upon farmers (and, ultimately, everyone) to be stewards of the land, Protestant agrarians promoted farming as a religious vocation. But again, they did not do so alone. Like the methods described in the previous chapters, the promulgation of stewardship depended on close partnerships between churches and the forces of government.

Even a brief look at recent Christian literature and action on the environment will show how thoroughly the idea of stewardship has structured contemporary Christian thought. Today there are many Christian organizations, from across the denominational 191 spectrum, dedicated to promoting creation care, often working in particular for solutions to climate change—and almost all of these organizations characterize their work in terms of stewardship.1 Stewardship takes many forms, but always implies a deep (often familial) responsibility for the earth—a responsibility to care for it rather than despoil it.

As Charles P. Lutz, coordinator of the American Lutheran Church’s World Hunger

Program, put it in 1979, “I first learned the word stewardship in that context—care of the earth, recycling of life-giving substances, carefull [sic] management of what has been provided, and rhythmic working in harmony with nature’s cycles.”2

The scholarly consensus to this point has been that the idea of stewardship is a relatively recent phenomenon within American Christianity. Robert Booth Fowler, for instance, writes that that Protestants only really awoke to environmental challenges after the first Earth Day in 1970; “since 1970, stewardship has been the environmentalist path most often proposed by Protestant Christians seeking to serve God and God’s creation.”3

1 A full bibliography of “creation care” literature would be overwhelming, but even brief examination reveals that the word “stewardship” often shows up even in titles of books. See for instance Tri Robinson with Jason Chatraw, Saving God’s Green Earth: Rediscovering the Church’s Responsibility to Environmental Stewardship (Boise, Ida.: Ampelon, 2006); Scott C. Sabin, Tending to Eden: Environmental Stewardship for God’s People (Valley Forge, Penn.: Judson Press, 2010); Fred H. Van Dyke et al., Redeeming Creation: The Biblical Basis for Environmental Stewardship (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1996). Some of the more prominent creation care organizations in the United States include the Association for Religion, Ecology, and Society (arecology.org), the AuSable Environmental Institute (ausable.org), the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change (catholicsandclimatechange.org), the Evangelical Environmental Network (creationcare.org), the Evangelical Climate Initiative (christiansandclimate.org), GreenFaith (greenfaith.org), Interfaith Power and Light (interfaithpowerandlight.org), and the National Religious Partnership for the Environment (nrpe.org). Catholic sisters have been particularly active in environmental work. A listing of environmental projects in the US organized by Catholic sisters can be found at http://www.sisterfarm.org/eco-spirituality-centers.html (accessed June 19, 2012). See also Sarah McFarland Taylor, Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). 2 Lutz, ed., Farming the Lord’s Land, 11. 3 Fowler, The Greening of Protestant Thought, 76. But see the taxonomy of interpretations given by Oelschlager, Caring for Creation, 128-171. 192

Roderick Nash and other scholars express a similar view, that stewardship was of little importance to Christians before the environmental movement of the 1960s.4

Not only is stewardship seen as a recent development, but historians have also argued that it was originally a secular idea, adopted later by Christians. Typically, the idea of stewardship is traced back to Aldo Leopold’s 1949 A Sand County Almanac.

Donald Worster calls Leopold’s work, published posthumously, “the single most concise expression of the new environmental philosophy. It brought together a scientific approach to nature, a high level of ecological sophistication, and a biocentric communitarian ethic that challenged the dominant economic attitude toward land use.”5 Roderick Nash went so far as to call Leopold a “prophet.”6

Leopold’s contributions were certainly profound. He believed that the early twentieth-century conservation movement (which sought to manage natural resources scientifically) had not really extended ethical standing to the land itself. Leopold argued that a true ethics was based upon a sense of cooperation based upon community solidarity. The land ethic that he proposed “simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land….In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land- community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”7

This ethic derived at least to a certain extent from Leopold’s personal spirituality.

Leopold was interested in the theosophy of P.D. Ouspensky (and the ideas of Liberty

4 Nash, Rights of Nature, 87-120. Fowler and Nash are echoed by Moody, “Caring for Creation,” and Stoll, “Quest for Green Religion.” 5 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 284. 6 Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 182. 7 Leopold, Sand County Almanac, 204. 193

Hyde Bailey), and believed that humans had an innate sense that the earth was a living organism. He did not, however, subscribe to any organized religion.8 Leopold was certainly no friend to orthodox Christianity. Like many other critics throughout the twentieth century, Leopold regarded the Genesis story as one of the culprits behind

Western culture’s destruction of the earth. “For twenty centuries and longer,” Leopold told an audience at the University of Wisconsin in 1934, “all civilized thought has rested upon one basic premise: that it is the destiny of man to exploit and enslave the earth. The biblical injunction to ‘go forth and multiply’ is merely one of any dogmas which imply this attitude of philosophical materialism.” Leopold believed ecology as a science could disrupt the wider culture’s appetite for destruction—what he called “the iron-heel mentality” of crushing the land beneath humanity’s supposed needs.9

Mark Stoll has recently argued that when Christianity embraced the idea of stewardship, it was “essentially an act of baptism of the thoroughly secular Aldo

Leopold’s ‘land ethic’….”10 But significant as Leopold’s statements certainly were,

Protestant agrarians had in fact been developing the idea of stewardship a decade or more earlier than Leopold. Stewardship was a native Christian language.

During the Depression, American Christians were already at work constructing a theology of agriculture and conservation that looked very much like Leopold’s post-

World War II land ethic. Theirs was not a professionalized theology; rather, it was developed in action—in local church congregations, on farms, and in the meetings of

8 Curt Meine, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 214-215, 376. See also Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 191-196. 9 Aldo Leopold, “The Arboretum and the University,” in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, edited by Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 209-211. 10 Stoll, “Quest for Green Religion,” 268. 194 missionary organizations and government offices. But their theology of stewardship wove together the three elements that Worster argues were new in Leopold’s thought: science, ecology, and the importance of community.

This history has been largely ignored both by the scholars cited above and by

Christian writers. Christian writing on agriculture since the 1970s shows very little attention to the historical dimensions of these ideas, focusing instead on the contemporary state of American farms, and the relationship between agribusiness and family farms.11 Even a 1992 volume on missionary work in agriculture included very little awareness of that work’s historical dimension.12 Most contemporary Christian creation care literature pays no attention to agriculture at all.13

The idea of environmental stewardship as a Christian duty developed not in the wake of Silent Spring but rather in the wake of the Dust Bowl. It was American

Christians’ growing concern over dangerous agricultural practices that led them to develop an environmental consciousness, and an ethic of cooperation with the earth.

Christianity and Soil Conservation

Just as the Depression’s human and financial costs had catalyzed grass-roots agrarianism like the Lord’s Acre movement, its environmental effects also transformed

11 Fred Bahnson and Norman Wirzba, Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2012); Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture; Fick, Food, Farming and Faith; Graham, Sustainable Agriculture; Lutz, ed., Farming the Lord’s Land. 12 DeWitt and Prance, eds., Missionary Earthkeeping. 13 In addition to the representative creation care works listed in footnote 1, none of which have anything substantial to say about agriculture, see for instance Wright and Kill, Ecological Healing; Fragomeni and Pawlikowski, eds., The Ecological Challenge; and DeVos et al., Earthkeeping in the 90s: Stewardship of Creation, which discusses agricultural changes briefly (pp. 26-32), but goes into no further detail. A rare exception is Travis H. Nation and Kenneth D. Dill, “Land and Water Conservation,” in Care of Creation: Christian Voices on God, Humanity, and the Environment, edited by Joseph Coleson (Indianapolis: Wesleyan Publishing House, 2010), 125-138. 195 the Christian agrarian movement. By 1930, when Protestant agrarians looked at the countryside, they could not avoid seeing the environmental consequences of the industrial transformation of American agriculture. One of the biggest problems they noticed was the widespread degradation of the soil caused by intensive and short-sighted agricultural practices. Particularly in the Midwest, where vast expanses of monocropped fields were typical, erosion of the land was drastic and rapid. By the time of the Depression, soil erosion on the nation’s farms was so severe that estimates placed the number of thoroughly ruined acres at approximately 35 million, with hundreds of millions of additional acres severely damaged. It would take nature on its own, according to the government, at least 400 years to replace each inch of lost topsoil.14

Soil degradation led to the Dust Bowl catastrophe, and to many observers, if drastic solutions were not found, the problem could become much worse. Without healthy farmland, of course, there could be no farms, and without farms the health and spiritual vitality of American families and communities would be severely impacted. To

Protestant agrarians, farm life was the best, most moral, most spiritually productive setting in which to grow and flourish. Conserving the land was necessary to provide space for family farmers to maintain the tradition and pass the abundant life down to their children.

But conserving agricultural land was not only a means to an end; it was intrinsically important as well. The land itself was holy, given by God to those who would work it and care for it. Land, and in particular arable land, was a sign of God’s plenitude and beneficence. It carried, to Protestant agrarians, the symbolic memory of the garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve had been the first farmers. Farmland gave people

14 Sampson, For Love of the Land, 6; USDA SCS, Our Soil: Its Wastage—Its Prevention, n.p. 196 the ability to carry on the divine commission to stewardship. Because it was a gift from

God, people had a duty to protect and care for it.

Thus, for many Protestant agrarians, an environmental sensibility was interwoven with their concerns for family, community, and culture. They could not limit themselves to only reforming human activities and human congregations. Their religious beliefs taught them that humans and non-human nature were inherently conjoined—all intimately part of God’s creation. Though the Christian ecological consciousness embraced all types of nature, and promoted the wise use of all natural resources, the natural focus for Protestant agrarians was on agricultural land and people’s relationship with the soil itself.

For decades, Protestant agrarians devoted themselves to the cause of soil conservation, joining with secular conservationist groups as well as the federal government to encourage farmers to protect and rebuild their soil. They devised both theological justifications and concrete plans for dealing with the problem of soil degradation. They called upon farmers to see it as their duty to conserve the land that

God had created.

Environmental historians have paid insufficient attention to the role that the soil conservation movement played in the history of American environmental thought and activism. Although soil conservation does appear in the environmental history literature as a temporary government phenomenon of the 1930s—a relatively successful aspect of

New Deal central planning—historians have argued that soil conservation lost its exigency after the immediate Dust Bowl crisis was resolved.15 At that point, historians

15 Worster, Dust Bowl; Beeman and Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land, chapter 1; Madison, “Green Fields,” 164. 197 have argued, the government encouraged farms to return to the same processes of industrialization and corporatization that had been in motion for decades—trends which did not lend themselves to environmental sensitivity. Sarah Phillips, for instance, argues that New Deal conservation policy resulted in a political structure that no longer promoted small family farms. Tim Lehman argues that between the 1930s and 1970s there was little interest in either the environmental conservation of farmland or the preservation of farmland from urbanization and development. According to this consensus, it was not until the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, with people like Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner calling attention to the detrimental effects of agricultural pesticides and technologies, that agriculture and conservation again began to coincide—leading to the present-day sustainable agriculture movement.16

Like the consensus on stewardship itself, this scholarly consensus is wrong on a number of counts. First, soil conservation was never confined to the government. It had important social and religious dynamics that exceeded, although they cooperated with, the political power of the government. The religious component of soil conservation was far more motivational and effective than the government itself had been.

Second, concern over the environmental impact of American farms did not emerge from hibernation in the 1970s. Americans did not forget about soil conservation when the Great Depression ended—instead, all throughout the central decades of the twentieth century, many people quite openly criticized the industrialization of the nation’s agriculture. Many continued to call attention to soil degradation and exhaustion.

16 Phillips, This Land, This Nation, 216, 237; Lehman, Public Values, Private Lands; Beeman and Pritchard, A Green and Permanent Land, 89-100. But see also Kolar, “Conserving the Country,” for a different view. 198

Though they have been overlooked, Protestant agrarians were some of the nation’s loudest champions of agricultural conservation. Even after the government’s interest waned, soil conservation’s religious resources enabled the movement to persist for decades. Protestant agrarians constructed a stewardship ethic that helped contribute to the contemporary language of creation care. In doing so, they helped bring countless

Americans into the environmental movement.

Soil Conservation in the Federal Government

The federal government’s work to conserve the soil and institute land use planning is a legacy of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Under the 1933 National

Industrial Recovery Act, the Roosevelt administration created the Soil Erosion Service as part of the Department of the Interior. Its director, Hugh Bennett, was a USDA soil scientist who had begun soil erosion experiments in Oklahoma in 1929. When put in charge of the Soil Erosion Service, Bennett worked hard to bring the new agency the visibility and the funds it needed. The dust storms that began to ravage the plains in late

1933 and the spring of 1934 gave the government the impetus to expand its services. The

Soil Erosion Service was transferred to the USDA in 1935 and was renamed the Soil

Conservation Service (SCS).17

The SCS promoted a variety of technical strategies to relieve the pressure of eroding soil, first as demonstration projects and later through technical assistance to farmers. One of the most common was contour farming. “Contour farming is conservation farming,” claimed the SCS. Planting in rows horizontally along the curve of

17 Rasmussen and Baker, Department of Agriculture, 34-36; Baker et al., Century of Service, 190-200; Simms, Soil Conservation Service, 9-17; Worster, Dust Bowl. 199 a hillside, even a gentle slope, stopped water runoff and prevented crops from being swept away by rainfall. By contrast, vertical furrows up and down the hill were easy to plant but offered no breaks for water. In addition, it was easier to move both animals and tractors along contours. Contour farming could be combined with strip cropping, where strips of soil-holding crops would be interspersed with strips of riskier conventionally- tilled crops like corn. The erosion-resistant crops would reduce the impact of the conventional crops. Where there were no slopes or hills, like on much of the central plains, strips would not be contoured but instead be planted in straight lines against the prevailing wind direction, to slow down wind erosion. Windbreaks could also be created using trees and shrubs. The SCS also promoted the use of green manure and cover crops.

Nitrogen-fixing crops like legumes could be used to hold the soil in place, especially on hillsides, and could then be plowed into the soil to increase its fertility. When strategies like these were combined into an overall plan for a farm, along with annual crop rotations, erosion could be drastically reduced and the health of the soil could be improved without using chemical fertilizers.18

The Soil Conservation Service, in its early years, operated with an evangelical zeal. In fact, both Hugh Bennett and Assistant Chief Walter Lowdermilk believed that soil conservation was necessary for the survival of civilization. Bennett called soil “the mother of mankind” and “the most important natural resource which God provided for the permanent use of man,” and declared that “if we should be so inconceivably foolish as further to neglect our fundamental resource of productive soil…and thereby lose it, we then cannot have a permanent agriculture in America. And without a sound and vigorous

18 USDA SCS, Our Soil: Its Wastage—Its Prevention, n.p.; Van Dersal and Graham, The Land Renewed, 35-59; Simms, Soil Conservation Service, 29-54. 200 agriculture…we cannot have a vigorous nation or a permanent America.”19 Despite the risks, Bennett remained hopeful. “I do not believe we shall take the dark course,” he said in 1944. “With the aid of the church and all of our educational forces, I believe we may bring thinking people everywhere to a some reasonable conception of the sacredness of productive land—and of our moral, patriotic, and common-sense duty to safeguard this land.”20

Lowdermilk, a forester and hydrologist who had worked for the U.S. Forest

Service before coming to the SCS, believed that “the possibilities of the earth, when its resources are fully husbanded in the advanced knowledge of soil conservation, are far beyond the imagination of mankind in general. How much better if the vast energies of the human race could be directed toward such a goal of conservation than toward destruction.”21 Deeply critical of war and militarization, Lowdermilk believed that these trends were dissipating the vital energy and resources that people needed to put towards protecting the earth. “If we make conservation, in its fullest conception, the goal for our people and for our national home and institutions,” he declared, “the American people may be destined to save the material and spiritual gains of mankind from the ruins of the destructive annihilations of war….But without the maintenance of a permanent agriculture and conservation of natural resources, neither can we nor any nation long endure the forces that have destroyed civilizations of the past.”22

19 Hugh H. Bennett, “Soil and Men,” Tidings 6:4 (July-Aug-Sept. 1944), 61, 62, 63, box 17, folder 11, Home Missions Council of North America Records, 1903-1951, NCC RG 26, PHS. 20 Hugh H. Bennett, “The Mission of Soil Conservation,” in National Convocation on the Church in Town and Country, “Urgent Tasks of the Church in Town and Country,” 14, 21. 21 W.C. Lowdermilk, “Reflections in a Graveyard of Civilizations,” Christian Rural Fellowship Bulletin 45 (Oct. 1939), 7. On Lowdermilk’s career, see J. Douglas Helms, “Walter Lowdermilk’s Journey: Forester to Land Conservationist,” Environmental Review 8:2 (Summer 1984), 132-145. 22 W.C. Lowdermilk, “Reflections in a Graveyard of Civilizations,” Christian Rural Fellowship Bulletin 45 (Oct. 1939), 8. 201

However, this zeal did not last within the SCS. As Tim Lehman puts it, “Whereas

Bennett had approached conservation as a moral imperative, the SCS of the 1950s came at the problem as a matter of scientific expertise.”23 But that did not mean that the ethical perspective had disappeared. Soil conservation as a moral imperative had already been championed for years by Protestant agrarians. They would continue to discuss the moral and religious character of the land for years to come.

The Eleventh Commandment

Ever since the government began working in earnest to promote soil conservation during the Depression, Christian leaders had noticed. Soil conservation was never the exclusive province of agricultural scientists and federal officials. Its values were promoted in the nation’s churches as well.

In fact, for a time the lines between scientists and preachers were blurry indeed.

Walter Lowdermilk’s dedication to the SCS crystallized in a statement he called the

“Eleventh Commandment,” a commandment “which Moses doubtless would have been inspired to deliver to the Israelites had he foreseen how the Promised Land and billions of acres around the world, would be damaged by the ignorance, negligence and suicidal exploitation of lands of succeeding generations.”24 Touring the Palestinian Mandate in

1939, Lowdermilk struggled to give voice to his anger at the degradation he was witnessing. The land that had once been Eden, wrote Lowdermilk, “is now a desert, void of trees and vegetation as if close shaved.” Millennia of erosion had resulted in silt deposits along the Tigris and Euphrates that overwhelmed the landscape. Four million

23 Lehman, Public Values, Private Lands, 47. 24 W.C. Lowdermilk, “Footnotes on the Holy Land,” The Land 1:2 (Spring 1941), 117-119. 202 cubic yards of silt were deposited by the rivers annually, washed away from “overgrazed mountains in the north.” Lack of proper irrigation, lack of care for the soil, and overuse of pasture land had denuded what had once, to Lowdermilk, been a biblical paradise.25

He channeled his anger into biblical language. The commandment Lowdermilk devised read as follows: “XI. Thou shalt inherit the holy earth as a faithful steward, conserving its resources and productivity from generation to generation. Thou shalt safeguard thy field from soil erosion, thy living waters from drying up, thy forests from desolation, and protect thy hills from over-grazing by thy herds, so that thy descendants may have abundance forever. If any shall fail in this stewardship of the land his fruitful fields shall become sterile stony ground and wasting gullies, and his descendants shall decrease and live in poverty or perish from off the face of the earth.”26

It was a text that excited Protestant agrarians for years. “For us whose immediate livelihood is in terms of the soil and what it produces, Dr. Lowdermilk’s words strike with peculiar and telling force,” said Rev. Howard J. McCarney of Evangelical Lutheran

Church Zion in Middletown, Maryland in 1956. “You know all the methods—crop rotation, terracing, contour and strip farming, reforestation and permanent grass, water conservation and winter cover,” he told his congregation. “But knowing what to do is worthless until you have the will to do it….So we stand confronted by a choice—a decision. And ultimately—Men will become true stewards of the land on which they live only as they seek first the kingdom of God.”27 His sentiments were echoed by pastors and

25 W.C. Lowdermilk, “Reflections in a Graveyard of Civilizations,” Christian Rural Fellowship Bulletin 45 (October, 1939), 1, 3. 26 W.C. Lowdermilk, “The Eleventh Commandment,” American Forests (January 1940), 12-15. 27 Howard J. McCarney, “Stewardship of the Soil,” in “Selected Sermons on Soil Stewardship 1955,” 7-8, box 61, folder 8, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 203

Christian thinkers around the country. The text of Lowdermilk’s commandment was even printed in church programs to remind churchgoers of their obligations.28

Preaching Soil Conservation

Religious leaders of all kinds championed the idea that soil conservation was a

Christian duty. In 1943, John Reisner, then director of Agricultural Missions, Inc., stated his belief that “the whole world must recover reverence for the land….We dare no longer dissociate religion and land in our everyday thinking or in our Christian worship.”

Echoing both Lowdermilk and Liberty Hyde Bailey, Reisner believed that to damage

God’s land was not just foolish but deeply sinful. “If there is any one clear lesson taught in the Bible and borne out by the experience of mankind,” he argued, “it is that the wrong use of land is not only a crime against society but a sin against the living God. What a great boon it would be to our religious experience if we would become conscious of the fact that God’s care for the land is real, that He is watching over it and that we can be keepers with Him of the Holy Earth which He created.”29 The following year, representatives at the New York State Rural Church Conference declared as a central pillar of their rural philosophy, “We cannot have a happy and forward looking civilization nourished from an impoverished soil. All natural resources are gifts of God to be husbanded and as stewards of life we are responsible for using them toward the development of human personality for both present and future generations.”30 Soil

28 See for instance the church program from First Methodist Church (Somerville, TN), May 15, 1955, box 61, folder 3, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 29 John H. Reisner, “The Earth is the Lord’s I: Land and Religion,” Farmers Federation News 24:3 (Nov 1943), 23; John H. Reisner, The Earth is the Lord’s II: The Land and Lessons from the Bible,” Farmers Federation News 24:4 (Dec 1943), 23. 30 Report of the Commissions Groups at the State Rural Church Conference, Lisle, New York, May 22-24, 1944, 7, Rural Institute folder, box 3, Hugh Anderson Moran papers, #39-2-972, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, CUL. 204 conservation was the emblematic issue, but conservation and stewardship extended to all aspects of creation.

This belief often rested on biblical interpretation. Rather than interpreting the creation story through a lens of dominion, they saw conservation as the fundamental scriptural message. But rather than work out a detailed exegesis of Genesis, agrarians generally focused on other parts of the Bible. The last chapter demonstrated the Lord’s

Acre movement’s interest in books like the Psalms. The New Testament was also a central inspiration for Protestant agrarians. Jesus was seen as a country person, comfortable in the fields, and his parables displayed a clear concern with agriculture.

As early as 1922, Edwin L. Earp, professor of sociology at Drew University, published Biblical Backgrounds for the Rural Message, in which he argued that the biblical writers had a “consciousness of rural facts and situations else they could not have used them intelligently nor could their hearers or readers have understood them unless they, too, were rural-minded.”31 Earp provided scriptural references for a wide variety of agrarian arguments and principles, ranging from agricultural procedures to community life and the building of the Kingdom of God. On the importance of the land itself, for example, Earp pointed not to Genesis but to Leviticus 25:1-23 and Deuteronomy 11:11-

12, in which the promised land and the Year of Jubilee were described. Earp drew a lesson about soil fertility and soil conservation from Matthew 13:3-8—the parable of the sower—and from Jeremiah 4:3, in which the Israelites are instructed not to sow amidst thorns. “The church must preach and teach the gospel of the sacredness of the soil as the

31 Earp, Biblical Backgrounds for the Rural Message, viii. 205 gift of God in trust for all the people, the sin of soil depletion and the peril to the nation when the land is robbed of its crop-producing values,” Earp concluded.32

The life of Jesus offered the most direct examples. Congregationalist leader

Malcolm Dana published Christ of the Countryside in 1937, in which he retold the life of

Jesus from an agricultural perspective. Jesus, Dana notes, was born in a manger, of all places, and before his public ministry began he lived and worked among common working people. “Jesus is not set apart to his lifework by some noted ecclesiastic,” Dana argues; “nor is he consecrated in the midst of a dignified assembly, gathered together for that purpose in some great cathedral. He is baptized by a country minister, in a country stream, and surrounded by a group made up most largely of country folk who witness the ceremony.” Dana calls attention to the ways in which, throughout the gospels, Jesus constantly retreats to the wilderness, and even more so to the ways in which his language reflects his country origins. “Christ of the Countryside is acquainted with the agriculture of his time and country; and he believes in the dignity and worth of an avocation which has more to do with creative processes than any other….Thirty-two of his sixty-four parables take his listeners out into the open country, and thirty-seven of his forty-eight miracles have an outdoor background….Such knowledge and use of the world of growing things naturally result in a special interest in the farmer and farming of

Palestine.” To Dana, and to other Protestant agrarians, Jesus had an agricultural mind.33

Building on this biblical understanding, denominational leaders helped promote soil conservation. In 1937, for instance, Mark Dawber, Superintendent of the Department of Town and Country Work in the Methodist Episcopal Church Board of Home Missions,

32 ibid., 5, 18, 20. 33 Dana, Christ of the Countryside, 25, 67. 206 criticized Americans for their improper attitude toward the earth, relying on the moral force of another of Jesus’ parables: “It is this sense of stewardship of the land that is lost.

We have wasted its riches prodigally, and now we are learning the bitter lesson of the prodigal.”34 Dawber was a major proponent of the government’s soil conservation efforts—because of his Protestant agrarian ethic, not primarily because of conservation’s scientific or economic benefits. “We have sinned against God’s holy earth through ignorance, selfishness and greed,” wrote Dawber. “Fortunately, a new day is dawning.

We are waking to our unfaithful stewardship and our perils….The church has a responsibility to keep before its people the sacred trust that is involved in the stewardship of the soil.”35

One year after Dawber’s book appeared, a fellow Methodist, Aaron Henry

Rapking, superintendent of the Department of Town and Country Work for the Methodist

Board of Home Missions, published a study guide for rural Methodist churches called

Building the Kingdom of God in the Countryside. In it, he described the various parts of a community that made up the Kingdom, ranging from parenthood to music to education.

But he emphasized that farms themselves were crucial. “I am convinced that it is impossible for the farmer to have the best possible conception of an attitude toward God without having the right attitude toward the farm,” he wrote. Conserving the soil was a central aspect of that right attitude. “This is God’s earth, and we are stewards of the treasures hidden in the soil, and the earth on which the future generations must depend for life and development….As the Kingdom spirit is given a chance farmers will be conscious of the fact that they are colaborers with God, stewards, and that some day they

34 Dawber, Rebuilding Rural America, 30. 35 ibid., 33, 37. 207 will have to give an account of their stewardship.” Although land needed to be developed and farmed in order to provide sustenance and livelihood for people, that development needed to take into account both future responsibilities and religious obligation. “The spirit of the Kingdom will help a man to have the right attitude toward the land,” Rapking wrote. “He will enter into a real vital relationship with the Creator and be conscious of the fact that in the great scheme of developing folk who will be worthy of eternal companionship and fellowship with God the tillers of the soil play a very necessary and important part.”36

Members of other denominations agreed. The Evangelical United Brethren, one of the denominations that later merged to form the United Methodist Church, also made conservation and environmental stewardship a central pillar. In a 1949 report to the

Brethren denomination on rural life, the Board of Missions stated clearly the importance of “the teaching and practice of Stewardship of our natural resources – Our soil, the mother of natural resources, is the basis of our existence and the measure of our future; it is the concern of ALL people. Millions of acres of waste lands should be rebuilt. Our churches must co-operate with the USDA, Agricultural colleges, County Agents, Rural

Life Departments, and radio programs in the rebuilding and conserving of our soils. If we take care of our land, it will take care of us.”37

Charles Bonsack, general secretary of the General Mission Board of the Church of the Brethren, declared that “soil erosion is not only a crime against the soil and future generations, but it is also one against the God of nature who has so wisely provided that it

36 Aaron Henry Rapking, Building the Kingdom in the Countryside (New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1938), 46. 37 Benjamin H. Cain, “Our Extension Programs Among Our Rural Churches,” folder “Commission on Rural Life, Minutes and Reports, 1949,” Records of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, Board of Missions, United Methodist Church Archives, GCAH. 208 should not be.”38 Edward K. Ziegler, a Church of the Brethren pastor and author of multiple books on rural worship, emphasized in 1959 that soil conservation was essential to the church in the countryside. “If the church does not cry out against feudalistic land tenure systems and wasteful farming practices,” he exhorted, “it could lose its influence among many village people today.” In a particularly telling move, Ziegler was clear that soil conservation was an issue that involved everyone, and transcended other sources of division. “This is not to say that the Church should take sides in political or economic issues. But it must teach stewardship of the land, just landlord-tenant relationships, and reverence for the earth as God’s handiwork.”39 Soil conservation, to Ziegler, was not about politics; it was about the Christian duty to respect God’s creation. Ziegler examined a host of Old Testament passages that supported this idea of respect, followed by an exploration of the same idea in the New Testament. “The appreciation of the earth as man’s God-given home is carried over, complete and unaltered, from the Old Testament.

The complete and unselfish stewardship of the earth and all its gifts is explained by Jesus in the parable of the rich and foolish farmer (Luke 12:16-21)….It may be said that the

Bible is our finest textbook on soil conservation.”40 Ziegler called for a return to biblical principles, and for pastors to understand the necessity of both preaching conservation and stewardship, and living it themselves.

Baptists too championed conservation and stewardship. One of the leading Baptist voices on rural life was C.R. McBride, for many years professor of rural leadership training at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Kansas. In 1949,

McBride published Rural Christians and Natural Resources, an adult study guide based

38 Charles D. Bonsack, “Nature Speaks of God,” Christian Rural Fellowship Bulletin 36 (Nov. 1938), 3. 39 Ziegler, The Village Pastor, 58. Emphasis in original. 40 ibid., 59-60. See also Ziegler, Rural Preaching, 37. 209 around scriptural readings having to do with land, creation, work, and community. “In religious circles, by and large,” McBride wrote in the workbook’s foreword, “we have given little heed to the significance of natural resources.” In a world where abundance,

McBride stated, was enjoyed by fewer and fewer people, leaving more of the world’s population in poverty, the issue of the treatment of the environment could not be ignored.41

McBride saw himself as being on the forefront of Christian work in this regard:

“So far as the writer knows, there is no other course of study like this one. This, then, is of necessity a pioneering venture.” McBride began by describing the typical American rural dweller, and the state of the nation’s rural churches. Then, following the first creation story in Genesis, McBride described the way in which the health of the land affected the future of human society and the church itself. “The church has a legitimate concern in the use men make of land, because human destiny and the church’s destiny is in the land….If strife came to so fine a home as Abram’s because the land was not able to bear both him and his nephew, how do we expect to escape strife and bloodshed if we so strip our land that it becomes impoverished to the point where it will no longer feed and clothe us?” Yet McBride argued that the earth was intrinsically valuable as well, because it was only borrowed from God: “The earth is the Lord’s by right of creation, and all around us are the works of God which speak continually of his power and glory. Whether we look up into the heavens or down into the depths of the earth, we can see his marvelous works. We need only to open our eyes and look.” One of McBride’s

41 McBride, Rural Christians and Natural Resources, 5. 210 discussion questions read, “When we are using the property of another, in what condition should we return it? How does this apply to the natural resources of the earth?”42

Calling humankind “the wastrel,” McBride castigated the way in which war, short-term thinking, pollution, and erosion had ruined much of the capability of the nation’s—and the world’s—productive land. As with creation in general, there was a steep human cost to losing arable soil. “America’s world leadership is due, in large measure, to her soil and its many products,” wrote McBride. “There is a direct relationship between the marvelous productivity of her land and the power, wealth, and vigor of her people.” Losing the land would sap the strength of the nation; “as our natural resources vanish we shall find our culture, with all of its economic and spiritual values, slipping lower and lower.”43

McBride’s study guide went on to discuss farm tenancy, homesteading, rural industries, and how to promote a healthy rural church. It ended with five central suggestions for projects that students might discuss: study groups, to promote democratic solutions to problems; soil conservation districts, where churches might cooperate with the SCS; church committees to help local people with community services; public celebrations like Rural Life Sunday and harvest festivals; and economic farm cooperatives. These projects would, in McBride’s view, help local churches and communities counteract the debilitating effects of soil degradation and environmental waste.44

Ralph Felton, professor of rural church at Drew Theological Seminary, also created a study course for Methodists about the soil. Felton, like so many others, began

42 ibid., 19-27. 43 ibid., 39-41. 44 ibid., 112-118. 211 with the idea of Adam in Eden, the first farmer. “Here begins the sublime dignity and worth of all who work upon the land,” wrote Felton. The first part of the study course assigned Bailey’s The Holy Earth as reading and asked, “What would you think of the

Board of Missions sending out trained farmers as missionaries?” The second part described the ways in which soil had been ruined as well as the government’s attempts at conservation. “When a man buys a farm,” wrote Felton, “he buys the use of it indefinitely….He is merely a trustee, a steward on God’s earth. God said that the earth was ‘good.’ It is to be cherished, not sinned against.” The rest of the course described the relationship between farms and the church, gave examples of soil conservation projects, and challenged students to improve their own communities. “Perhaps we can make our country and our home community a Promised Land for returning servicemen.”45

At this point we can only speculate what the fruits of statements and courses like these might have been among the people and communities who read and engaged in them. At the very least they must have created controversy and stimulated discussion; at best they may have been influential in helping rural Christians see themselves as partners with God and stewards of the soil. Whatever their influence, denominations very clearly championed the conservationist ideal and encouraged their members to see stewardship as an environmental issue.

This perspective could be found not only among leaders, but among individual religious workers and preachers as well. In the late 1940s, J.B. Griffings, an agricultural missionary who had served many years in Brazil, offered a representative view of the

Christian environmental perspective on soil conservation. “This wealth which the creator

45 Ralph A. Felton, Man’s Use of God’s Earth: An Adult Study Course (Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1945), 2, 5, 8; box 17, folder 11, Home Missions Council of North America Records, 1903-1951, NCC RG 26, PHS. 212 had spent millions of years in building, careless farmers have swept into the ocean with wrong practices,” he wrote. “To a rural pastor, ‘The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’ should have a new meaning. He should realize more fully than others that no one of us really possesses the land he calls his own. He is the Lord’s tenant. If he wastes and destroys the precious soil which has been placed in his charge for a brief time he commits a greater sin than if he robbed a bank. He or his children might be able to repay the bank.

But when he destroys the top soil he robs many future generation[s] of the food which should have been theirs.” Soil conservation, to Griffings, was a “sacred responsibility.”46

Other laypeople agreed. In a Methodist journal, Henry Blanding, a Baptist layman, affirmed his conviction that the Bible’s perspective was that “conservation was not merely a matter of saving and keeping, but one of proper use, so that the land and all it produced should continue to meet the needs of mankind.”47

Pastors throughout the nation preached about soil conservation as a divine injunction, after the fashion of Lowdermilk’s commandment. Many of them did so on

Rural Life Sunday, one of the days set aside for attention to rural issues.48 Others, like

Howard and Alice Kester of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, devised their own special ceremonies to focus attention on the soil.

But the Kesters’ attention to the soil was intimately tied to their more commonly remembered work for social justice. Their 1941 Ceremony of the Soil, used for a

Nashville meeting of the Christian Rural Fellowship, was, in the Kesters’ words, “a

46 J. B. Griffing, “A Letter from an Agricultural Missionary to His Seminary Student Friend.” Agricultural Missions Mimeograph Series 211. Missionary Research Library Pamphlet Collection 2199, UTS. This mimeograph publication is not dated, but based on the description of the author on the first page was published sometime in the late 1940s. 47 Henry Blanding, “The Stewardship of Land,” Tidings 6:4 (July-Aug-Sept. 1944), 47, box 17 folder 11, Home Missions Council of North America Records, 1903-1951, NCC RG 26, PHS. 48 See chapter 2 above. 213

Christian interpretation of God’s commission to man to be the good husbandman of His vineyard. The liturgy seeks to reveal the essential unity of God, the earth, and man and the spiritual laws governing man’s relation to the earth.” It began with a series of Old

Testament readings related to creation and agriculture, interspersed with prayers from the reader and the congregation. “Enable us to realize, we beseech Thee,” ran one prayer,

“that our relationship to the earth is a moral one: that to plunder Thy Holy Earth and waste its resources is a denial of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

Reveal to us that our faithlessness to the earth is today revealed amidst the hunger, the poverty, the want and wretchedness destroying our brothers and sisters.” The program continued with texts intoned by four “Voices,” representing humans, the church, the earth, and God himself, all emphasizing the religious duty to protect the land God had entrusted to people. The service concluded with the dedication of soil spread out on a table. “It is our responsibility as faithful Christians to build on this earth the Kingdom of

God,” said the reader, touching the soil. “How can we build a world of free and noble men, women, and children when we fail to care for the life-giving soil which nourishes the people and provides the foundations of human society?” The soil was then distributed into individual envelopes and given out to all the people present.49

The Kesters’ emphasis on the connections between poverty and the soil suggest that the religious message of conservation had broadened the scope of what it meant to be a Christian. Taking care of one’s church had always been necessary. Taking care of one’s neighbor was, for most Christians at least, the import of the parable of the Good

49 Howard and Alice Kester, “Ceremony of the Soil—A Service of Worship,” Christian Rural Fellowship Bulletin 69 (February, 1942). On the Kesters and the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, see Anthony P. Dunbar, Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets 1929-1959 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981); John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1994). 214

Samaritan. But now, mainline Christians expanded the circle of their responsibility to the earth. As the Rev. Harold Cole of First Baptist Church, Auburn, Alabama, put it, “If I should seek to find one single word that would summarize and characterize the totality of all Christian living, it would be the word stewardship. Man’s accountability and responsibility to God. His glorious privilege of sharing with God in not only the material but the spiritual ventures of life. Until we have come to appreciate the deep concept of stewardship, we have missed the ultimate meaning of our spiritual experience.”

Stewardship meant more than just land use; it meant taking care of all natural resources, and it also meant maintaining a healthy human society. “Man’s attitude toward the land, therefore, reflects his attitude toward God,” said Cole. “An eroded soil reflects an eroded people. An eroded soul will reflect an eroded land.” To Cole and others like him, a holistic stewardship reflected the biblical narrative of creation: “We are a part of the soil, but God also breathed into man the breath of life, he is soil and soul. He is a glorious amphibian.”50

C.R. McBride argued that Christians could go even deeper—to see themselves not simply as stewards, but to approach the earth with an attitude of “sonship.” “As

Christians we are children of God in a sense that did not exist before we knew Christ,” he wrote. “When Christians look upon the earth they should see and understand that as

God’s children it is in their joint property….Therefore, they will care for all the land as good children of a wise, loving, and gracious Father. Sonship is not license to destroy the

50 Harold Cole, “Still a Good World,” box 55, folder 33, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 215 earth, but the opportunity to put one’s life into improving it for the welfare of the present generation and for all coming generations.”51

The National Council of Churches and Agricultural Conservation

Though economic issues like farm tenancy had drawn attention from interdenominational groups like the Home Missions Council, environmental conservation was coming increasingly to dominate discussions of rural land use. By 1950, a columnist for Progressive Farmer predicted that in the coming decade, rural Christians would be increasingly devoted to the idea of soil conservation. “A growing emphasis will be made on the relation that exists between man, land, and God,” wrote James Sells. “This will result in preaching and teaching the necessity for the salvation of the soil and continued control of soil erosion.” Sells, in keeping with the eschatological view of other Protestant agrarians, saw conservation as a matter of supreme importance. “The former emphasis was to escape hell and gain heaven. The future emphasis will be [to] drive evil out of the present world and to establish heaven on earth, thus making the Christian a fit occupant for the heaven to come.”52 The social gospel of societal perfection remained strong among Protestant agrarians into the 1950s.

During that decade, the federal government began experimenting again with rural policy, with an interest in stemming the epidemic of rural poverty and agricultural industrialization, transformations that jeopardized the economic health of small farmers.

The USDA Rural Development Program, instituted in 1955, was, according to Laura

51 McBride, Rural Christians and Natural Resources, 32. 52 James W. Sells, “The Rural Church, 1950-1960,” Progressive Farmer (Carolinas-Virginia Edition), January 1950, 23. 216

Kolar, “the first federal effort to recognize the changing needs for, uses and role of rural

America’s resources, including farms themselves, after World War II.”53

The Rural Development Program set up pilot community development projects through the USDA Extension Service. These projects extended credit to farmers seeking improvements, offered technical assistance for conservation practices and ancillary sources of farm income like forestry, and set up recreational opportunities aimed at rural people. Although the program was chronically underfunded when compared with other

USDA programs, its contributions nevertheless paved the way for federal conservation efforts in the 1960s and 1970s.54

The National Council of Churches (NCC), founded in 1950, applauded the

USDA’s efforts. In response, Undersecretary of Agriculture True D. Morse, director of the Rural Development Program, invited the NCC to participate in the program’s organization and activities. A full-time NCC staff member, based in Memphis, was appointed to work exclusively with the Rural Development Program, and was “available for consultation to churches and church groups and secular agencies as well as local, state and federal government agencies working in the program.”55 The NCC, in keeping with its policy that “the church has had an historic concern for the wise use of the earth’s resources and believes that proper conservation of natural and human resources are basic

53 Kolar, “Conserving the Country,” 32. Kolar’s work, the first such study of postwar federal agricultural conservation policy, does not discuss the NCC or its cooperation with the Rural Development Program. 54 Kolar, “Conserving the Country,” 44-57. 55 NCC Department of Town and Country Church, “The Church and the Rural Development Program” (1959), 4, box 16, folder 8, NCC Division of Home Missions Records, 1950-1964, NCC RG 7, PHS. On Morse see Kolar, “Conserving the Country,” 47-48. 217 to the fulfillment of Christian stewardship,” found the Rural Development Program beneficial.56

The NCC encouraged pastors to discuss the Rural Development Program with their parishioners, emphasizing “the unity of life, cooperation and working with others, concern for those less fortunate, and helping people to help themselves.” In addition, ministers as well as laypeople served on the county-level and state-level committees that administered the Rural Development Program.57 The Christian presence was prominent, because the federal government realized the importance of engaging rural Christians and church leaders in the effort to improve rural life.

The NCC and Stewardship

Through efforts like this, the leaders of the Department of the Town and Country

Church began to realize that the challenges facing American farmers were deeper than simply economic. The department had to acknowledge that “many churches of rural

America had a deep and abiding interest in ‘the land’ and the role that it should play in the future of American Agriculture.”58 In 1955 the department sponsored a conference at the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary that focused directly on the issue of land stewardship. It was attended by representatives from the NCC and leaders from the major rural denominations, as well as government representatives from the USDA Agricultural

Research Service, Soil Conservation Service, Farmers Home Administration, Farm Credit

56 NCC Department of Town and Country Church, “The Church and the Rural Development Program,” 2, NCC Division of Home Missions Records. 57 NCC Department of Town and Country Church, “The Church and the Rural Development Program,” 5, NCC Division of Home Missions Records. 58 NCC Department of Town and Country Church, “Christian Stewardship of the Land: Proceedings of the Conference on the Christian Stewardship of the Land, held at the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, June 2-4, 1955,” 5, box 16, folder 8, NCC Division of Home Missions Records, 1950-1964, NCC RG 7, PHS. 218

Administration, and National Association of Conservation Districts, members of the major farm organizations such as the Farm Foundation, American Farm Bureau

Federation, and National Grange, academics interested in rural and religious issues, and individual members of churches.59

The authors of a preconference paper circulated by the NCC suggested four essential principles of conservation for the conference to discuss. First, the authors suggested that land use should always be in the service of humans, and that “the good of the land should never take precedence over human well-being.” Second, land use was immediately important; planning should address the needs of people currently living on the land. Third, although immediate needs were critical, land use needed to look to the needs of future generations as well, because “Christian stewardship morally obligates each generation to pass on a land resource of higher quality than it received.” And fourth, any conservationist work needed to recognize the ultimate sovereignty of God, and that

“a ‘good life’ is the result of faithful relation to Him.”60 The NCC also distributed a list of relevant scripture passages, from both the Old and New Testaments, as prooftexts for the principles they suggested—including Micah 4:4, an illustration of what the authors called

“the ideal land tenure,” which read, “but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.”61

59 NCC Department of Town and Country Church, “Christian Stewardship of the Land,” 46-48, NCC Division of Home Missions Records. 60 “The Christian Stewardship of the Land,” quotes at 3, 7, 9, box 15, folder 5, NCC Division of Home Missions Records, 1950-1964, NCC RG 7, PHS. 61 “The Judeo-Christian Teaching of Land Stewardship Scriptural Background,” 3, box 15, folder 5, NCC Division of Home Missions Records, 1950-1964, NCC RG 7, PHS. The translation is the RSV, given in the NCC document. 219

At Louisville the conference accepted the four basic principles laid out in the preconference paper, and essentially reproduced that paper in the official proceedings.

The participants also set forth a broad definition of stewardship: “Christian stewardship is the systematic practice of using all one’s powers and the material assets which have been entrusted to one’s care for the furtherance of God’s will and the fulfillment of His purpose.” But using material resources responsibly was difficult, because of the lessons of ecology. The conference agreed that “it is impossible to separate the stewardship of one resource from that of the others.” In an agricultural context, this meant that soil was a

“dynamic” resource, one whose health is constantly affected by other environmental changes.62

Christian land conservation did not mean neglecting the needs of humanity. The whole point of cultivation was to provide humans with the fruits of the soil, in order to feed an ever-growing population. Economic growth was required. Drawing on the New

Testament parable of the talents (Mt 25:14-30), in which “Jesus condemned the unfaithful servant who gave back only the talent he had received,” the conference affirmed the principle that future generations deserved a higher quality of land and productivity than the current generation began with.63

Although it argued that economic growth was both a practical and moral necessity, the conference believed that relying on economics alone could lead to irresponsible and un-Christian behavior. “Individual actions aimed at economic efficiency,” wrote the conference, “may or may not be consistent with our definition of

God’s will and purpose.” If farmers only did what would be of the most economic benefit

62 NCC Department of Town and Country Church, “Christian Stewardship of the Land,” 8. 63 ibid., 15. 220 to themselves, they might not contribute to the proper flourishing of God’s people. In fact, there were moral and spiritual goods that could not be embodied in economic transactions. “Greater efficiency usually leads to higher incomes, but increased incomes may or may not lead to better social welfare.”64

Technology, used wisely, could increase the productivity of the land. The conference did not seek to avoid modern technological progress, nor did they underestimate how technology had allowed the human population to grow. The conference agreed that technology was valuable and useful: “There is a great need for more adequate technical services to be extended to small farms that have the basic resources, if used efficiently.”65 But technology, and the land to which it was applied, needed to be used ethically. “Land is usually considered instrumental to human existence,” wrote the conference, “but it is much more than that. It is a part of God’s creation—alive, pulsating. It is a part of us and we a part of it. But our unique humanness adds another dimension—that of stewardship.”66 The possible extreme was dangerous:

“Irresponsible use and exploitation of the land, in violation of the ethical and moral teachings of Christianity, are a challenge to civilization. Either we fulfill the stewardship of the land and carry on to higher levels of human development or we waste the land and retreat to the shrinking oases of our man-made deserts.”67

Therefore, stewardship created a clear universal moral responsibility. “Thus

Christian stewardship of the land relates to all actions affecting non-farm as well as farm people, people of other countries as well as our own, and future generations as well as

64 ibid., 16. 65 ibid., 13. 66 ibid., 15. 67 ibid., 10. 221 this generation.”68 The Christian ecological vision on which the conference relied imagined, we might say, a cosmic ecosystem: “No man can fulfill this stewardship without finding his rightful place with God, with the land and with his fellowmen.” This cosmic interaction, though it intended to conserve and protect, was not romantic. “We believe that this is more than a backward, primitive view,” argued the conference,

“because to the best of our knowledge land is and always will be essential to human existence.”69

The NCC intended the work done at the conference to reach people who were not there. A study guide for the conference proceedings, distributed by the NCC and aimed at rural pastors, reemphasized the importance of taking care of the soil. “No matter how many devastating wars, no matter how many new boundaries and no matter how much shifting of peoples over the earth, there is one unchanging phenomenon—world without end, community by community—and that is dependence on the land.” The guide urged pastors to learn as much about the local land situation as possible: “Raise questions about land use, conservation, and tenure when visiting among your people. Talk about these subjects with the banker, the agricultural teacher, the county extension agents, leading farmers, and with various agencies.” It reminded pastors of the availability of resources such as the Soil Conservation Service and the national system of conservation districts.

Then pastors could introduce conservation and land use questions into their sermons, and discuss them in Sunday school classes and adult gatherings. The study guide also suggested that churches create farm and land stewardship committees, which could survey church members in order to gain even more data about the specific situations

68 ibid., 9. 69 ibid., 18. 222 facing the congregation, and “can think about setting up a revolving loan fund to help one or more young couples get started [in farming].”70

In the years following the Louisville conference, the NCC affirmed its interest in becoming more actively involved in conservation. In 1957 it created a conservation committee overseen by the Department of the Church and Economic Life. The committee issued a memorandum describing its intentions for a process of study and data collection, particularly on habitat loss, resource depletion, and erosion—but also on more abstract phenomena such as “the loss of contact with the natural setting” and “the loss of spaciousness, quietude, and privacy, within which persons can mature.” The NCC envisioned making contacts with conservationist groups, government offices, as well as industry representatives, in order to bring its research into a wider conversation.

Ultimately, however, it intended to put all of this work into the service of educating church members.71

The NCC received much positive feedback on this proposal. Elmer Bennett, acting Secretary of the Interior, wrote, “if we can be of any further assistance please let me know.” Charles Callison, conservation director of the National Wildlife Federation, gave the proposal “an emphatic YES!” D. Harper Simms of the Soil Conservation

Service agreed that “soil conservation districts have a deep interest in the stewardship concept of conservation.” Aldous Huxley praised the memo, stating that “we need to build bridges between science and technology on the one hand, and art, ethics, and religion on the other.” Not all recipients praised the idea, however. U.N. Fellow Albert

70 E.J. Niederfrank and Wendell R. Tascher, “Discussion Guide on Stewardship of the Land,” 2, 6, 7, box 16, folder 8, NCC Division of Home Missions Records, 1950-1964, NCC RG 7, PHS. 71 “A Possible Church-Wide Program on the Role of the Churches and Resource Use and Conservation,” box 15, folder 4, NCC Division of Home Missions Records, 1950-1964, NCC RG 7, PHS. 223

Lewpasky disagreed that Christianity was any more likely to promote conservation than any other religious group, while Old Dominion Foundation member Monroe Bush (who ironically would later participate in the environmentalist Faith-Man-Nature Group) claimed, “I believe that the church has no more function to perform in conservation than I do in a Balinese chorus.”72

The State and the Spiritual Necessity of Soil Conservation

The critics of the churches’ involvement with conservation seem to have been in the minority. The spiritual necessity of soil conservation was apparent not only to religious professionals—it appeared in ostensibly secular places as well, and was widely publicized. In the 1940s, following their successful promotion of conservation measures to combat the Dust Bowl, the USDA’s Soil Conservation Service published a small booklet called The Lord’s Land. Written by Morris Fonda in cooperation with the conservationist organization Friends of the Land, and financed and published by the

Sears-Roebuck Foundation, the booklet described the work of the SCS in deeply religious terms.

The SCS booklet began with the 24th psalm. If the earth was the Lord’s, then humans had a vocation to stewardship. The SCS pointed back to ancient settlements that had wasted that opportunity to steward their natural resources. “Throughout the ages, in one way or another, man has disputed this stewardship of the land, claiming its use for personal and often selfish benefits,” wrote Fonda. Antioch, Babylon, Timgad (North

Africa): all had fallen into ruin because of an inability to prevent erosion and

72 Memoranda, September 21, 1959, and September 24, 1959, box 15, folder 4, NCC Division of Home Missions Records, 1950-1964, NCC RG 7, PHS. 224 environmental degradation. The implication was that if the United States did not want to follow the example of the fallen civilizations of Babylon and even Rome, it needed to reform its farming practices as quickly as possible.73

But saving the soil would not be an easy task. “The fact of the matter is that very few of us really know what soil is,” wrote Fonda—“to say nothing about its value.” The process of soil formation operated on a far longer time scale than modern humans, at least, were accustomed to think about, and would require dramatic changes in practice.

The damage that had already been done was tremendous: “We in America,” he wrote,

“have outstripped, by far, any other region or nation in the world in soil exploitation. This is not taking a pessimistic view—it is merely facing the facts.” Although crops like corn naturally depleted the nitrogen levels of the soil, making it less fertile for the future, the amount of topsoil and fertility lost through erosion was dramatically more than that lost through cropping itself. But for Fonda and the SCS, the loss of topsoil was more than just an economic problem for agriculture; it was a moral failing: “Because we have failed to treat the land with the reverence it deserves, because we haven’t recognized that ‘The

Earth Is the Lord’s,’ and because sound land use principles and conservation measures have been neglected the land has deteriorated—and the people have suffered along with it.”74

One of the main goals of the Fonda booklet was to promote soil conservation among the nation’s clergy. The organization suggested that clergy tour farms facing erosion problems so that they could understand the challenges first-hand, and then write sermons on land use and conservation. Sunday school classes could discuss the

73 Fonda, Lord’s Land, 6. 74 ibid., 10, 13-14. 225 relationship between humans and the land. The proximity of clergy to their parishioners, and the close personal relationships forged in church communities, made clergy particularly appealing as partners for the SCS in the struggle to promote conservation.

The SCS also suggested that churches themselves would see benefits from promoting soil conservation. Using data from studies of South Carolina and Texas churches, Fonda argued that churches in areas with better soil were more likely to have larger memberships and receive greater financial contributions from their members. “It isn’t a question of people not wanting spiritual guidance because they live on eroded soil,” wrote Fonda. “They just don’t always have the means to support their church as it should be supported where the soil is gone.”75 Conservation would lead to more prosperous communities economically and spiritually.

Other government organizations echoed the religious language of the SCS. A soil conservation textbook from 1950, prepared by the Georgia State Soil Conservation

Committee, described in technical and scientific terms what good soil conservation involved. Yet it closed with a significant chapter called “Response of the Good Earth,” which presented the moral and spiritual case for soil conservation. The authors’ argument rested on an understanding of the earth’s systems as reciprocal and self-adjusting.

“Through the operation of nature’s laws, the earth has power to destroy land and civilizations,” the authors wrote; “this power comes in the form of wind and running water—soil erosion and floods….The response of the earth is always in kind; that is, in accord with the treatment received. Good treatment of the earth is always rewarded; neglect, waste, and exploitation are always punished.”76 Like the SCS, the authors looked

75 ibid., 23-24. 76 Chapman, Fitch and Veatch, Conserving Soil Resources, 305-06. 226 back in history and contrasted the biblical example of Antioch, which today “lies buried under 18 feet of silt carried down by the Orontes River,” with Rome, which patently “still stands and exerts no little influence in the modern world.” Antioch “was destroyed by soil erosion” whereas “the people of Rome and the country surrounding the city have always been soil-erosion conscious.”77

These types of “soil jeremiads” were typical at the time. It was a common rhetorical strategy to look back to the ancient world and point to collapsed civilizations that had exhausted themselves through poor agricultural practices.78 Yet the authors of the Georgia textbook went a step further in assigning blame. The authors argued that “the dominant sin of the people of Antioch was failure to accept stewardship responsibilities for God’s Holy Earth.”79

The example of Antioch led the textbook authors to look to the Bible for more comprehensive advice about conservation and environmental stewardship. Like the SCS and so many Protestant agrarians, they pointed to Psalm 24:1—“The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof”—and took that verse very seriously. “God’s ownership of the earth is not only theology; it is also economics—very sound economics….We cannot discharge our obligations as stewards simply by giving a portion of what we gather from the harvest; we must realize that our neglect may be the factor that determines the amount of the harvest.”80 The Georgia textbook accepted the idea that the earth had been created by God for the temporary usage of human beings: “We did not make the earth. We have received it and its bounties. We are here as part of the great plan of creation. We cannot

77 ibid., 307. 78 Beeman and Pritchard, Green and Permanent Land, 11-18. 79 Chapman, Fitch and Veatch, Conserving Soil Resources, 307. Emphasis in original. 80 ibid., 309. 227 escape. We have an obligation to live with each other and with all living things; it is our duty to live in harmony with our environment.” The necessity of working in partnership with God’s creation came with a stern warning, after the example of Antioch: “Any people who do not accept stewardship responsibilities for God’s Holy Earth do not long remain stewards; this is the record written in the pages of history.”81

Thus, for the Georgia State Soil Conservation Committee, the Christian creation story inspired a deeply ecological vision of life on the earth, an ecology that incorporated not only nonhuman nature but also humans and all aspects of society and culture. Human society was not exempted from the principle of natural interdependence; rather, humans needed to arrange society in such a way that it would adhere to ecological principles and exemplify the stewardship with which God had endowed them.

The religious narrative of soil conservation could be found in other state organizations as well. R.K. Bliss, director of the Iowa Extension Service at Iowa State, gave a series of talks in August 1955 that were broadcast on Des Moines radio station

WOI. In six daily broadcasts, Bliss shared his belief that Christian farmers had an especial duty to “wisely use, preserve and build the soil, the food production of which helps to make possible the prevention of hunger and want,” and to maintain that soil capacity for the benefit of future generations. Jesus’ parable of the talents suggested disapproval of those who made no use of the gifts bestowed on them. “How much more the condemnation would have been had he destroyed it,” said Bliss. “May we not believe that the way in which we use our natural resources, the talents given us by the Creator to work with, will in large measure determine our future?” Bliss repeated the jeremiads typical of other soil conservationists, warning listeners of historical civilizations that had

81 ibid., 322. 228 perished, as well as contemporary nations on the brink of disaster, because of poor treatment of the soil. Calling soil “the Great Mother of us all,” he maintained that it was instead possible to preserve its perpetual fecundity, through careful management and replenishment. The loss of topsoil which took hundreds of years for nature to produce

“need not occur…if we will but make use of the brains the Creator has given us.”

Ultimately, Bliss stated, “it verges on the sacrilegious to destroy, or permit to be destroyed, such a marvelous creation as the soil.”82

The religious aspect of soil conservation was therefore promoted not only by preachers and religious leaders but also by the government. Neither the SCS nor state extension services were reluctant to use Christian language to discuss the importance of conserving the soil. This certainly may have been strategic, an appeal to a particular demographic, but the earnestness with which these organizations used Christian language suggests that the religious motivation did indeed permeate the government. Christianity was one of the major motivators behind soil conservation in the middle of the century.

Soil Stewardship Sunday

The Christian perspective that had structured the soil conservation movement for decades received another boost in the 1950s, with the involvement of the National

Association of Soil Conservation Districts (NACD). This organization was created in

1946, and oversaw an existing network of 1638 soil conservation districts.83 Conservation

82 R.K. Bliss, “Christianity and Our Stewardship of Natural God-Given Resources,” Iowa State College Agricultural Extension Service, 1955, quotes at 6, 4, 11, 12; box 60, folder 1, Iowa Farm Bureau Federation Records, MS 105, Special Collections Department, ISU. 83 Held and Clawson, Soil Conservation in Perspective, 52. In 1962 the association changed its name to the National Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts, but the accepted abbreviation remained NACD. 229 districts had been created under the SCS as departments of state governments, and were responsible for devising conservation plans appropriate to the local area. Districts carried out research on local conditions, performed demonstrations, and loaned equipment and resources to farmers. Typically they formed voluntary agreements with landowners to have their recommendations carried out. In many states they also enacted binding regulations concerning land use, though these were often “complex and cumbersome.”84

By the 1960s, conservation districts encompassed nearly 2 billion acres of land, including

92% of the nation’s farms. They continued to push for the cropping and plowing practices championed by the SCS.85

In 1955, less than ten years after the formation of the NACD, the organization broadened its tactics by beginning to appeal to the nation’s Christians for help in promoting and carrying out soil conservation. To do this the organization threw its weight behind an annual observance called Soil Stewardship Sunday. This was a day on which churches were called to address and promote the issue of soil conservation, either in the regular sermon for that day or in special added services.

Soil Stewardship Sunday had been initially devised by the publishers of Farm and

Ranch magazine (as “Soil and Soul Sunday”) beginning in 1946. Because response among its readership was strongly positive, the magazine offered the idea to the NACD in the fall of 1954. The following spring, the NACD became the sole sponsor of Soil

84 Sampson, For Love of the Land, 35. See also Parks, Soil Conservation Districts, 11-24. 85 Gordon K. Zimmerman, “Conservation Districts,” in National Convocation on the Church in Town and Country, “The Challenge of Change,” 40. 230

Stewardship Sunday. In 1956 the NACD expanded the observance from a single day into

Soil Stewardship Week, scheduled between the fifth and sixth Sundays of Easter.86

The decision to expand the observance from a single day to a full week was based upon the recognition that many churches were already observing the fifth Sunday after

Easter as Rural Life Sunday. An official NACD statement on the origin of Soil

Stewardship Week notes that “the world over, people on Rogation Days beg the mercy of

God and ask that He spare His children the evils of soul and body – and give good increase to the plants of the field. In our own land it has met an evident need of the people to set aside a week each year to acknowledge before God our gratitude for His gifts of soil and all the bountiful resources associated with it. The week has become a special time to remind people that these gifts warrant their best in Christian stewardship.”87

Like Rural Life Sunday before it, Soil Stewardship Sunday drew on the influence of national government. Just as Rural Life Sunday was promoted by 4-H and the USDA

Extension Service, the NACD, and in particular the advisory committee that oversaw the stewardship observance, operated from an explicitly Christian standpoint that saw stewardship as the responsibility of all true Christians. An Iowa State scientist affirmed that the conservation districts “regularly emphasize man’s moral and spiritual responsibilities to serve as good stewards of the soil.”88 “To the committed steward,” a member of the Soil Stewardship Advisory Committee wrote in 1966, “every challenge to

86 “The Origin and Observance of Soil Stewardship Week,” www.tsswcb.texas.gov/files/contentimages/soil_stewardship_origins.pdf (accessed May 31, 2012); Sampson, For Love of the Land, 94. 87 “The Origin and Observance of Soil Stewardship Week.” 88 Gordon K. Zimmerman, “Conservation Districts,” in National Convocation on the Church in Town and Country, “The Challenge of Change,” 41. 231 the careful husbanding of God’s basic resources for life is a crisis….Whether he is an active Churchman or not, we believe he will respond to the call of moral responsibility to meet the crisis….If a Churchman, we hopefully expect him to use the agencies of his

Church as a steward faced with critical needs.”89 Although both the USDA and the

NACD were arms of government, both promoted Christian ideals.

The Ideas Behind Soil Stewardship Week

Each year the NACD published materials for churches that would assist them with discussing and promoting stewardship among their congregations. Chief among the materials was an annual booklet. These publications clearly describe the purposes of the organization, and their views on the importance of environmental conservation.

The NACD’s simplest message was that the earth was a gift easily destroyed. Soil in particular was an astounding ecosystem unto itself, which both gave life to growing plants and absorbed decomposing organisms. “While these two processes seem to be in opposition to each other,” the NACD wrote in 1957, “they actually are in complete harmony. They are engaged in a collaboration so harmonious and so intricate that it should cause the child of God to stand in awe at the wisdom of his Creator.” At the same time, soil could be wasted, especially through erosion. When that happened, and the land produced less food for the hungry, God’s purposes were frustrated. “To the degree that man decreases the productive power of a single acre of ground, he shortens the hand of

God in feeding his children.” The NACD emphasized the importance of careful

89 Harold S. Huff, foreword to NACD, “Crisis in the Countryside: Soil Stewardship Week May 15-22, 1966,” box 61, folder 11, NCC Division of Christian Life and Mission Records, 1945-1973, NCC RG 6, PHS. 232 husbandry.90 Similarly, without clean water resources for the nation as a whole, industry would be stymied, people’s health would suffer, and the family would lose the “unity and security essential to its well being.”91

At the same time, the NACD wanted farmers to realize that conservation, even agricultural conservation, was a much bigger issue than simply one of farm practices.

“[I]t is a major error in this half of the century,” wrote the NACD in 1966, “to assign all the resource problems of the countryside to agriculture—as a majority of Americans still do—or to equate them with the farm problem.” Because not all people living in rural areas were farmers, conservation in rural areas would affect all Americans, wherever they lived. There were plenty of other reasons why rural and agricultural land was important.

“Responsible stewardship, in its broadening performance, involves more than protection of land against damage. It extends to the enhancement of natural beauty in the countryside, to outdoor recreation, forestation, and the reclamation of waste lands. It involves the careful allocation of lands to multiple uses, in a range including timber production and water storage, housing and highways, grazing and nature trails, crop production and wildlife.”92 Water usage in particular was an issue that touched all

Americans, as it was a factor in housing patterns, recreational opportunities, and economic growth, in addition to affecting wildlife.

In other words, conservation meant nothing less than large-scale land use planning for the future of the nation. With all of the changes facing rural areas, the

90 NACD, “Soil Stewardship Week May 26-June 2, 1957,” 6-7, box 56, folder 51, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 91 NACD, “Soil Stewardship Week May 11-18, 1958,” 11, box 56, folder 59, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 92 NACD, “Crisis in the Countryside: Soil Stewardship Week May 15-22, 1966,” box 61, folder 11, NCC Division of Christian Life and Mission Records, 1945-1973, NCC RG 6, PHS. 233

NACD wrote in its 1978 booklet, “we can no longer afford to plunge onward indiscriminately in the allocation of land without the guidance of basic soils data, reasonable standards for economic and social development, and a scale of land values for alternative purposes.” Conservation meant adopting the best science, so that plans could be made with as much wisdom and prudence as possible. Yet the NACD emphasized that

“none of us knows the full extent of the resources God has placed at our disposal to nourish and develop in His service. Neither do we comprehend the whole range of His endowments to men and women among us to delve into unexplored areas and bring forth new treasures of material and knowledge for the benefit of mankind.” There would always be an element of surprise in dealing with the creation. Faithful action reflected active faith: “The real proof of our faith in God and in our devotion to the stewardship of

His resources is in the lives we live. It is a matter of what we do, rather than what we say.”93

The practical and scientific reasons for conservation and land use planning were clear. But the NACD was just as adamant that there were strict spiritual reasons for supporting conservation as well. “Man possesses two vital and related concerns upon which rest not only his well-being but his very destiny,” Rev. Walter A. Forred of

Lisbon, North Dakota, told the NACD at its 1954 convention. “One is his soul—the other his soil….They are inseparably related, and he must use caution that he does not use his soil in such a way as to lose his soul, and thus exclude himself from the Kingdom.” Poor land use could actually, in Forred’s view, jeopardize one’s salvation. “With such a prayer of dedication in our hearts may we unite our religious and our conservation practices to

93 NACD, “Compelling Ventures: Soil Stewardship Week April 30-May 7, 1978,” box 60, folder 14, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 234 build His Kingdom and fulfill His will until this world shall become a more acceptable footstool in spirit and reality for our God.” Like the Lord’s Acre movement, soil conservation in the NACD was seen in eschatological terms. Forred’s speech was reproduced in the 1955 booklet that went out to everyone participating in the soil stewardship observance, giving a clear organizational endorsement to his ideas.94 The

1959 booklet put the matter very starkly: “The persons who have access to created natural resources sin against God and man when they destroy those resources.”95

Publicizing Soil Stewardship

The NACD promoted Soil Stewardship Week heavily through the media.

Television and radio advertisements regularly described the duty that all Americans ought to feel for the environment. “What kind of community would you like to have in the next ten years?” asked the suggested script of one radio announcement. “Do you want more industry, about the same or less? Ask yourself the same question about agriculture, housing, recreation areas, shopping centers, and forest.”96 Another asked, “What will we do when there is no soil in which to grow our crops, when there is no grass, but instead an endless sea of asphalt and billboards? The jobs of environmental improvement and resource protection are waiting to be done. The environment starts in your own backyard and neighborhood.”97 The religious obligation was also regularly mentioned in media

94 Walter A. Forred, “Religion and Conservation,” in NACD, “Soil Stewardship Sunday, May 15, 1955,” 4, 7, box 60, folder 16, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 95 NACD, “The Earth is the Lord’s: Soil Stewardship Week May 3-10, 1959,” 10, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 96 Radio and TV spot sample scripts, box 57, folder 94, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 97 Sample radio and TV spots, box 57, folder 87, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 235 advertisements. One typical spot began with Psalms-inspired poetry: “The earth is the

Lord’s with riches unmeasured; / The home where we live, a world to be treasured, / We can spoil it, or keep it, as a land full fair / For we are His stewards; His earth is our care.

[Channel or radio station] urges you to ‘Consider the earth’ and ‘Consider it well,’ by joining your Conservation District in the observance of Soil Stewardship Week….”98

Local newspapers typically carried announcements of the observance, listed local churches holding celebrations, and encouraged readers to participate. They carried editorials and columns championing conservation, and in some cases the NACD placed full-page advertisements listing local businesses that were helping to sponsor Soil

Stewardship Week.99 Governors from Georgia to New Jersey proclaimed Soil

Stewardship Week as an official state observance.100

The NACD had a significant reach. In 1956, the first year of the weeklong soil stewardship observance, the NACD distributed almost 45,000 copies of a booklet containing sermons on stewardship, over 65,000 copies of its stewardship booklet, and over 350,000 blank church programs advertising the NACD.101 In 1958, although only just over half of the conservation districts in the country requested Soil Stewardship

Week materials for distribution, the NACD still printed almost 15,000 posters (sold at

98 Scripts of 60 second spots, box 57, folder 62, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 99 See for instance the large number of newspaper clippings in box 57, folder 1, and box 60, folder 14, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 100 See press releases in box 57, folder 1, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 101 Comparisons of Distributions for Soil Stewardship Week Materials in 1956 and 1957, box 56, folder 50, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 236

11¢ each), and sold 50,000 copies of its soil stewardship booklet (25¢ each), and over a million blank church programs ($7.50 for packs of 500).102

That year, the Georgia association of conservation districts reported that nearly

250,000 Georgians had participated in some way in the weeklong observance, including preachers delivering 1235 sermons on conservation, numerous civic clubs and schools carrying out programs and activities, and speakers delivering hundreds of radio broadcasts (“for a total of 15 1/2 miles of tape”).103 And this was just one state. A decade later the NACD was moving annually over 60,000 copies of the annual booklet, nearly a quarter million blank programs, a half million church bulletin covers, and over two million church bulletin inserts.104 These numbers grew steadily into the 1970s.105

Mass communication was not the only way to educate churches and ministers about the importance of conservation. Publicity also had a face-to-face component. In

1958, for example, the conservation district of Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, organized an all-day bus tour for local ministers. The tour visited seven farms around the county, where the farmers explained to the ministers the progress they had made in conservation. The tour concluded with a dinner provided by the Stone Valley Grange and a presentation on conservation from the district director. The district reported that it had sold booklets and books of sermons to the ministers, and given out two thousand bulletins

102 Analysis of Soil Conservation District Participation, 1958, box 57, folder 5, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. Prices are from the 1959 price list in box 57, folder 11, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 103 Press release, box 57, folder 1, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 104 Comparisons of Distributions for Soil Stewardship Week Materials, 1967 and 1968, box 57, folder 26, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 105 Comparisons of Distributions for Soil Stewardship Week Materials – 1971, 1972, 1973, box 57, folder 89, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 237 to be used in Northumberland County churches on Soil Stewardship Sunday.106 That same year, the conservation district of Canyon County, Idaho, sponsored a similar tour for ministers that demonstrated shelterbelts and water-saving devices on a number of local farms.107

Churches Respond to Soil Stewardship Week

Participation of ministers alongside the NACD was critical for the health of the soil stewardship observances. The sermons that preachers gave to their congregations suggest that they shared the NACD’s Christian ideology of conservation. “It will be quite pointless, you know,” said Rev. Donald L. Anderson, of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in

Albert City, Iowa, in 1968, “to realize the Christian dream of universal justice and love; a world truly at peace, and even a faultless theology in which everyone acknowledges the

Creator God if life is lost anyway because we allow our planet to become desolate and barren to the point that it cannot sustain life. It not only could happen, you see, it is happening.”108 Rev. Urban Baer of St. Wenceslaus Church in Eastman, Wisconsin, agreed that “the soil is not mere chattel. Land is not like a piece of furniture to be used or abused; neither shall it become the slave of the dollar sign. Furthermore, no farmer has a right to neglect his acres because, strictly speaking, no one has an absolute right to the land.”109

106 Newspaper clippings, box 57, folder 1, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 107 Newspaper clipping, box 57, folder 1, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 108 Donald L. Anderson, “Responsible for the Earth” (May 19, 1968), 7, box 57, folder 28, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 109 Sermon by Urban Baer, box 61, folder 8, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 238

Preachers often emphasized the necessity of cooperating with God. As in the

Lord’s Acre movement, soil conservation encouraged farmers to see themselves as co- workers for the spreading of God’s purpose. In 1957, Rev. Roy S. Buffat, Sr., of First

Presbyterian Church, Centralia, Illinois, exclaimed from the pulpit, “Behold, forever, this is God’s Good earth!....More power to the 2700 soil conservation units in America, and to the 8 1/2 million farmers, fruit growers and gardners [sic]! What a team of Partners with God in preserving, and rebuilding the lands and forests, and in preserving the water ways and lakes of our nation and world for the welfare of us all!”110 Edward A. Johnson, pastor of St. Peter’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Hay Springs, Nebraska, told his congregation in 1964 that “perhaps you have never thought of yourselves as ministers, but your work as farmers on God’s good land constitutes a ministry which you perform to his glory and in the service of other people….You may never stand in a pulpit to preach, but your fields and machinery and buildings are a sermon you preach constantly (and no one can shut them up after 20 minutes!).”111

Partnership could take multiple forms, but it still carried with it an important responsibility. Presbyterian pastor T.M. Cunningham, of Sanger, Texas, emphasized that for all of God’s sovereignty, it was up to farmers to do their part in making healthy crops grow. “But even God cannot make the field blossom with rich harvests if we fail to plant and water the field in the proper way,” he said in 1955. “Let us use our plow for a mourners’ bench and repent of past sins against the soil, and vow from our hearts we will cooperate with God in his ultimate purposes of creating a people for his own pleasure by

110 First Presbyterian Church bulletin, May 26, 1957, box 57, folder 3, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 111 Edward A. Johnson, sermon and church program, May 10, 1964, box 56, folder 11, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 239 correcting this one immediate step in his redemptive plan.” Cunningham rejected the fatalistic idea that soil degradation was a punishment for people’s sins. “If we want forgiveness we can find it in only one way—soil conservation and a resolute desire to restore that divine relationship between our souls and the soils.” Conservation would not only improve the physical health of the earth and those who lived upon it, but also their spiritual health.112

Churches also emphasized that soil conservation was not just for farmers. Barry F.

Cavaghan, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Corning, California, acknowledged in

1957 that “not many of us are farmers. In fact, only 11% of us are farmers in this nation, now. But what happens to the land is our business.” Because everyone in the country relied upon the productive capacity of arable land, if farmers were to waste their soil’s productivity, everyone would suffer. “At first it seems as if there is little that nonfarmers can do to protect the good earth God has bequeathed to this nation. But the 89% of us who are not farmers can sternly encourage the minority of careless and greedy farmers who rape the land here.” Cavaghan acknowledged that Corning was no different from many other places; within the local conservation district, land was suffering from extreme overgrazing, and farmers were failing to take advantage of the holding power of cover crops.113

Today, the NACD continues to oversee conservation activities throughout the country. Though the organization today does not immediately call attention to its

Christian character, it continues to sponsor soil stewardship celebrations for Christian

112 T.M. Cunningham, “Uzziah Loved the Soil,” box 61, folder 3, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 113 Barry F. Cavaghan, “Nine Inches from Destruction,” 5-6, box 57, folder 1, National Association of Conservation Districts Records, MS 460, Special Collections Department, ISU. 240 churches. Now promoted simply as Stewardship Week, spanning the final Sunday of

April and the first Sunday of May, the celebration “reminds us of our personal responsibility to care for the natural resources for which we all depend.”114 NACD continues to produce resource guides and educational materials aimed at churches participating in Stewardship Week, materials which regularly set forth the Christian ecological vision the NACD has for decades promoted.

One recent NACD guide for church leaders, written by Gina DeMarco of the

Northern Rhode Island Conservation District, describes ecology, broadly construed, as the heart of God’s plan for the world: “God’s original and continual intent for His creation is to be in harmony with Himself and among himself.” This harmony includes humans as well as non-human nature, because all of it was created by God. “There is a connectedness between humans and the non-living creation as is so well illustrated in

Romans 8:20-22 where we find the whole creation groaning as it awaits our redemption, because it too will be redeemed and fully restored upon Christ[’s] return.” Experiences in nature, the NACD argues, can give us a sense of the majesty and sublimity of God, and of our duty to protect that creation. Even experiencing nature in the city, “watching and waiting among the birds, insects, and small pockets of land set apart for recreation can be awe inspiring as well. Enjoy the sunrise and sunset—spectacular!”115

Conclusion

Soil conservation was a central pillar of the environmentalist message for decades before “environmentalism” became a political platform. And during those decades, one

114 NACD, “Soil and Water Stewardship: Church Leaders Guide” (2012), 2, http://nacdnet.org/stewardship/church_materials/ (accessed April 20, 2012). 115 ibid., 4, 8. 241 of the driving forces behind American soil conservation was Christianity—a particular type of Christianity that emphasized environmental stewardship. That notion of stewardship drew on a biblical ethic rooted in the Psalms and in the parables of Jesus.

Protestant agrarians carried this stewardship ethic into their collaborations with each other and with the powers of government. In doing so, they encouraged all other

Christians to see themselves as stewards of the earth. 242

Conclusion

Who Needs Rural America?

“Who needs rural America?” asked a 1970 workshop held at St. John’s University in Minnesota.1 For the participants, the question was rhetorical, but they knew it might be a legitimate query in many urban places. The need to convince the rest of the nation about the importance of rural life was hardly new in 1970. For decades, Christian agrarians were some of the loudest voices in the United States about the need for rural places.

Christian agrarians argued that the health of the countryside was an indicator for the health of the country as a whole. But they did not do so simply out of conservatism, inertia, or because they believed in some vague “Jeffersonian” myth. Christian agrarians sought to preserve their rural congregations because they believed that living in rural areas and working the land was most in keeping with God’s intentions for the world.

Protestant agrarians believed they were setting out a prescription that the rest of the nation might follow. In their view, the nation faced considerable risks when it emphasized urbanization and industrialization, and Protestant agrarians believed that there was a better way to live and work.

That way involved seeing the natural world as an inherently holy place. By working the land, people could cooperate with God, becoming partners in creation.

1 Klimoski and Krile, eds., Who Needs Rural America? 243

Christian tradition, according to the agrarians, enjoined human beings to cultivate and care for the earth. Agrarians and missionaries worked against the wider agricultural trends of the twentieth century by steadfastly imagining an agriculture based on caring relationships, not on domination or profit. Yet they did not simply seek to recreate the past. Instead, they envisioned a different kind of modernity, one that embraced certain aspects of contemporary America while remaining deeply critical of others.

They were up against considerable odds. American agriculture had been changing rapidly, and drastically, since the beginning of the twentieth century. As new technologies, from tractors to telephones, became more available, farmers embraced the ability (or at least the possibility) to make more money and be less isolated on the farm.

Strong demand for American farm products sent prices rising and put plenty of money into the pockets of farmers. At least some of them—rising prices coincided with increasing inequality between small and large farmers, and between black and white. At the same time, the federal government and the system of state land-grant universities were also encouraging farmers to see themselves not as artisans or stewards but as businessmen and factory owners. Farmers were exhorted to consolidate, expand, mechanize, and reduce the amount of human labor needed to run farms. By the end of the

1920s, these trends were widespread enough that American agriculture could be regarded as an industry.

Christian agrarians, however, paved a different way into modernity. They did not reject all of the advances of technology and modern society, but they argued for a context that was not simply based around profit. They did not want farm labor to be unduly difficult, but they did not want to see machines replace people on the land. They 244 appreciated the need for scientific analysis and management, but they argued that science could be put to use protecting the earth rather than despoiling it.

Christian agrarians also believed that rural modernity needed to cooperate with urban America, not reject it. The better way to the future also included cooperation, and forging new personal relationships as well. Despite the government’s investment in industrial agriculture, Protestant agrarians found the forces of government to be ready and willing participants in the agrarian crusade. State universities of agriculture and cooperative extension agencies were common partners of the mainline churches, and helped to train ministers and missionaries in agricultural science so that they might be better able to minister to their flocks. The Soil Conservation Service and the National

Association of Conservation Districts both aligned themselves closely with the ideas of

Protestant agrarianism and helped to promulgate the agrarian message throughout the country.

Even as the conference participants gathered at St. John’s, these agrarian collaborations were already being forgotten. That same year (also the same year as the first Earth Day), a National Council of Churches strategy conference discussed the relationship of the church to the question of environmentalism. The unnamed author of a position paper called “The Church Environment Question” identified the environment as the current “number one topic of conversation” in the nation, and realized that if churches were going to devote their time and financial resources to questions of environmentalism, 245 they would have to more explicitly develop their thinking—both theologically and practically—regarding environmental questions.2

The writer noted what seemed to be contradictions between federal policy and political rhetoric about the environment, and argued that significant environmental progress from the government was unlikely. The position paper noted the need for the church to pay attention to the administration’s actions, and if needed, “expose hypocrisy.”3 Rather than wait for the government, churches could and should take the lead on environmental activism.

The author of the position paper recognized that environmentalism was not a simple or straightforward issue, but rather one that intertwined with many other problems. “Can one talk about environment without moving into the area of national priorities? Can national priorities be discussed without involving the military-industrial complex? Can discussion of the ‘quality of life’ exclude disturbing confrontations with living conditions in the ghetto or rural Appalachia or even India?”4

This NCC author made environmentalism sound like a new topic for mainline

Christians to be aware of (and a self-serving topic at that). However, mainline Protestant agrarianism had already argued for decades that the church had a deep responsibility to the earth. Long before the environmental movement emerged as a political force,

Protestant agrarians had promoted an environmentalist critique of agriculture. That history, evidently, was already being buried by 1970.

2 “The Church Environment Question,” 1-2. NCC Division of Christian Life and Mission Records, 1945- 1973, NCC RG 6, Box 60 folder 16, PHS. Unfortunately, the document does not identify the author of the paper. 3 “The Church Environment Question,” 5. 4 “The Church Environment Question,” 9. 246

Still, as this dissertation has shown, the environmental ideas of Christian agrarians were only one part of their overall project. Agrarians had argued long before 1970 that it was indeed impossible to separate environmental problems from questions of poverty, work, and “national priorities.” Rural communities, as agrarians saw them, were holistic entities; in order to improve community, one had to look at all aspects of life. Protecting the earth could not be separated from improving opportunities for labor, family life, sociability, and even worship.

Christian agrarianism, of course, did not disappear in 1970, although their voices may have been harder to hear in the media-soaked din of recent decades. The mainline

Protestant denominations, along with the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, continued to call attention to rural problems and provide support to rural communities.

They began to pay considerable attention to the developing world, and to focus on poverty relief and rural aid in an international context. Programs like the Christian Rural

Overseas Program and the Heifer Project encouraged American farmers to see themselves as part of a larger world agricultural community. But agrarians remained committed to the domestic situation as well. Today, voices within Christian denominations from across the spectrum continue to raise the agrarian standard, although those voices are certainly not as dominant as they once were.

Despite having been forgotten in both the scholarly and Christian literatures,

Protestant agrarians formed an extremely influential group throughout the twentieth century. That influence cannot adequately be measured simply by counting membership in mainline Protestant churches. Rather, its effects can be seen in the degree to which agrarian ideas were received into the broader culture, including the environmental and 247 conservation movements. The belief that society is bettered when families own their own land and have close relationships with their communities is found in farmers’ markets and CSA programs around the country. Even within churches themselves, agrarian legacies can still be found. Community-based organizing strategies can be seen in Lord’s

Acre festivals and other cooperative stewardship activities. Worship services still call attention to planting and harvest times. “Creation care” literature can be found in (almost) any Christian bookstore.

Protestant agrarianism was broader and more flexible than purely secular versions, and it fit easily into the powerful institutions of American society like education and government. It encouraged farmers to take seriously their responsibilities toward the land. It encouraged churches to take seriously their responsibilities toward people living in rural areas. Ultimately, it made the case to the nation that rural America was worth saving. Those legacies are worth remembering today.

248

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CURRICULUM VITAE

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University, Department of History, 2013 MA Pennsylvania State University, Department of History, 2009 MA Drew University, Biblical Studies, with distinction, 2007 BA Cornell University, religious studies, magna cum laude, 2005

AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS

2012 Penn State Center for Global Studies Fellow 2012 Dissertation release, Penn State University Dept. of History 2011 McCourtney Scholarship, Penn State University Dept. of History 2010 McCourtney Fellowship Grant, Penn State University Dept. of History 2007 Research travel grant, Penn State University Dept. of History

PRESENTATIONS

“Building the Kingdom in the Countryside: Christian Missionaries, Agriculture, and Globalization.” Penn State Center for Global Studies Brown Bag Lecture Series, April 2012.